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CHARING CROSS TO ST. PAUL'S 







CHANCERY LANE 



CONTENTS 



CHAP. 


PAGE 


I. Introduction 


I 


II. Charing Cross 


20 


III. The Strand . 


. 63 


IV. The Strand {couduued) 


104 


V. The Law Courts 


• 147 


VI. Fleet Street 


. 184 


VII. Ludgate Hill 


• 213 


^TII. St, Paul's 


• 238 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Chancery Lane 

Flower Girls at Charing Cross 

Trafalgar Square 

Charing Cross 

King Charles's Statue . 

Morley's Hotel, Trafalgar Square 

St. Martin's in the Fields 

Busses .... 

Fish Shop at Charing Cross 

In the Strand 

The Strand 

Exeter Hall 

Terry's Theatre 

The Gaiety 

Wellington Street 

The Lyceum 

Burleigh Street, Strand 



Frontispiece 

PAGE 

23 
29 

33 
37 
41 
45 
53 
59 
67 
71 
77 
81 
86 
89 
93 
99 



X 



L ist of Illustrations 



The Strand, by Somerset House 

Somerset House . 

St. Mary-i.e-Strand 

St. Mary-le-Strand from the East 

Old Houses in Holywei.i. Street 

St. Clement Danes 

The Corner of Essex Street . 

The Law Courts , 

Entrance to the Courts 

The Clock Tower of the Law Courts 

Fleet Street 

St. Dunstan's in the West 

The Windows of "Punch" 

St. Bride's Passage 

"Storting Life" Office 

"Daily News" Office . 

The Railway Bridge, T,udgate Hili 

Ludgate Circus 

Wild's Hotel 

St. Martin's, Ludgate . 

St. Paul's Churchyard . 

West Door of St. Paul's 



PAGE 

I I I 
119 

129 

161 
171 

■85 
189 
192 

193 
197 
203 
214 
217 
223 
231 
243 
255 



Charinor Cross to St, Paul's 



INTRODUCTION 

We cannot — at least I cannot, to put it more 
modestly — reconstruct in mind the London 
of the far, very far past. I have set myself 
the task often, and laboriously tried to ac- 
complish it, but it will not shape itself, that 
far-away Roman London : it will not shape 
itself to my eyes or my mind. I cannot see 
the London with the cinctures of the great 
wall and the seven gates and the double 
cioors to each gate. The historical sugges- 
tion conveys to my mind no manner of 
idea. I cannot get back to a Roman London 
— a fortress London ; I can hardly believe in 
it. But lest any one should take my words 
too literally, and should assume me to be 

B 



Charing Cross to St. PauTs 



guilty of an absurd scepticism which ought to 
be instantly confuted by the citation of over- 
whelming evidence from history, I hasten to 
explain that I am not really sceptical in that 
sense. I have not the smallest doubt about 
the existence of the Roman London ; I only 
mean to say that I cannot believe in it in the 
sense of realising it and understanding what 
it would be to live in it. I have a friend 
who only cares about romances and novels 
which tell of the time with which he is 
familiar ; he will not condescend to read even 
the finest story of the chivalric age. " I don't 
believe in a man in armour," he says. Now 
my friend is, apart from this curious self- 
accepted limitation to his reading, a well-read 
man ; he is perfectly well aware that in olden 
days knights went to battle encased in steel ; 
I have no doubt he could, if need were, 
favour any company with a dissertation on 
the various kinds of armour in which men of 
different chivalric orders and ages bedizened 
and defended themselves. But his imagina- 
tion does not realise the mail-clad hero as 



Introduction 



a living creature, as a man and a brother 
with a soul to be saved, and a heart to be 
perplexed and betossed, and in that sense he 
does not believe in the man in armour. In 
that sense, and that sense only, I fail to 
put faith in Roman London. It lives for 
history ; it does not live for me. 

I have somewhat of a similar notion with 
regard to Rome — a notion which I fancy I 
share with most people, even with some 
scholarly persons, if they would only ac- 
knowledge it. I cannot reconstruct in my 
own mind the Rome of the Republican days. 
In vain I read and study and survey the 
ground itself; no Rome rises for me but the 
Imperial Rome — the Rome of the Caesars — 
the Rome of the Empire, or at all events, the 
Rome of those days which were blossoming 
or decaying into empire — the Rome of the 
first and greatest Imperator. I am inclined 
to think that it is so with most persons, 
and that the Rome which they can see in 
the mind's eye is the Rome which Horace 
and Juvenal and Martial and Persius have 



Chai^ino; Cross to St. PanTs 



described for us. London is real for me 
only so far back as when she rises before me 
mediaeval ; I can see her, recognise her, 
study her, appreciate her, and even live in 
her as the London of Chaucer ; beyond that 
day she is not London for me, but might be 
confounded with Troy or Persepolis or the 
capital of Cloud-cuckoo-land. 

Of that mediaeval London the most living, 
the most vital, the most real part, is that 
stretch of thoroughfare which connects 
Charing Cross with St. Paul's, hi this 
volume the artist with the pencil — who plays 
a much more important part than the would- 
be artist with the pen- — has taken from 
Charing Cross to St. Paul's for his province. 
This was, this is, the backbone of London. 
Mediaeval London grew up around it. The 
Strand was the baldric which belted Court 
and Parliament together ; the town grew up 
along and about the Strand as a coral island 
grows in the sea. Something of that growth 
and its gradual realisation is brought home 
to one's mind rather oddly during any session 



Introduction 



of the House of Commons. It happens in 
this way : A stranger standing in the inner 
lobby of the House of Commons at the 
moment when the House adjourns for the 
night is surprised to see an official rush 
into the midst of the dispersing crowd and to 
hear him shout, in tone loud as that of some 
Homeric hero, the mystic question, "Who 
Qfoes home ? " There is no answer — the 
man with the Homeric voice does not seem 
to expect any. The stranger naturally asks 
for an explanation. The explanation is' 
found in the fact that once upon a time 
London and Westminster were separate and 
widely-separated cities — a sort of desert of 
barbarism lay between. But a desert is not 
necessarily a place absolutely unpeopled. 
The Eastern desert has its Bedouins ; the 
desert between Westminster and London 
had its footpads and its mounted highway- 
men. People made up parties to ride home 
together, themselves and their servants, for 
common safety. So the official of the 
Houses of Parliament had it as one of his 



C/iariuQ- Cross to St. Paii/'s 



regular duties to shout out in the lobbies and 
the corridors the invitation which called on 
home -going people to close their ranks, to 
form this or that group, and to ride together 
across the perils of Lincoln's Inn Fields, or 
close by the skirts of Alsatia. Now, when 
the times are all changed, when not one 
member of Parliament out of a baker's dozen 
goes Cityward on his way home, when the 
highwayman has disappeared even out of 
our literature — unless where perchance he 
still lingers and lurks in the yellowing paper 
and the blurred print of some mean little 
publication for boys — still the nightly cry 
of "Who goes home?" is heard re-echoing 
across the lobby and through the corridors, 
and even along the terrace of the House of 
Commons. 

Long may it sound ! May its echo never 
grow less ! May no rage of modern innova- 
tion, realism, or utility abolish that function 
and silence that call ! It keeps alive in our 
minds — in the minds of those who have 
minds — some idea of the gradual growth of 



Introduction 



London ; we think of the nightly wayfarers 
riding or driving eastward, and we are there- 
by reminded of the growth of the Strand, 
and the part that growth played in the crea- 
tion of what we know as London. Do not 
let us assume too hastily that all since that 
time has been mere and sheer progress. 
We do not now make up parties to go home 
together for common safety, but might it 
not be well if we still sometimes did so } 
The highwaymen are gone, to be sure, but 
the robbers now occasionally — indeed, not in- 
frequently — take to the use of the revolver, 
and I have heard travelled men say that 
there are few places which have ever really 
scared them of nights like the Thames Em- 
bankment. However, I am not now en- 
gaged in a study of social progress, or a 
comparison of the virtues and the vices, of 
the dangers and the protections of this time 
and any other. My concern is to point to 
the fact that London grew up along and 
around the Strand, so that he who fares with 
Mr. Pennell, and if I may say so, with me, 



Charing Cross to St. Pauls 



from Charing Cross to St. Paul's, will have 
trodden the main highroad of England's 
national and imperial history. 

Palaces grew up along the Strand — we 
must remember that it was then a strand, 
and that the few houses built on its south 
side looked on the Thames — palaces began 
to grow up, for the great nobles naturally 
liked to have houses not quite too far either 
from Westminster or from the City. The 
younger nobles, and some of the elders just 
as well, no doubt, were fond of going down 
into the City ; the nobles borrowed money 
there from the acknowledged money-lenders, 
and from the jewellers and the silversmiths. 
The City wives had the repute of being 
pretty and coquettish ever since the days of 
Chaucer, and, perhaps, indeed, since long 
before: the young "swells" loved to go 
down to the City ; the citizens' wives were 
not ashamed then to sell their wares openly 
in their shops ; they sold embroidered shirts 
for the gallants, and gorgeous laced under- 
garments for the ladies ; and one may fancy 



Introdzidion 



from the dramatic literature of the time that 
many a middle-aged gentleman professed to 
have gone down to the shops of the City 
merely in search of pretty gifts of lace and 
embroidery to bring home to his wife and his 
daughters. In the later Elizabethan days 
and throughout the time of King James the 
City became a favourite haunt of gallants 
who loved to smoke tobacco. They did not 
call it " smoking tobacco " then — they called 
it "drinking tobacco"; they inhaled the 
tobacco into their throats, and they, not 
unnaturally, called that drinking it. Then, 
when there were any great difficulties in the 
wars of the sovereign, when troops had to 
be levied and money raised, when foreign 
war seemed to become inevitable, or domes- 
tic rebellion was whispered of in the North 
or in the West, then the City became a place 
of signal importance, and the ministers of the 
King were none too proud to go there and 
stand, metaphorically, plumed cap in hand, 
and beseech of the City magnates to rally 
with their money-bags around the Throne. 



lo Charing Cross to Sf. PauTs 

The City was almost always devoted and 
loyal — always, indeed, unless and until the 
kings entirely overdid the business of sover- 
eign kingship, as some of them certainly did, 
and then the City got together its trainbands 
and manfully stood by the country. But, in 
the meantime — for we have been anticipat- 
ing a good deal — the City was becoming 
gradually of more and more importance to 
the King and the Court and the nobles, and 
so the stately palaces began to arise along 
the Strand. Many an ancient water-gate, 
looking curiously out of date to-day amid the 
upsetting and demolishing and reconstruct- 
ing newnesses of the Thames Embankment, 
tells of that ancient time when the Strand 
was open to the river, even as the iron 
mooring- rings on some of the street walls 
of Ravenna remind one of the days when 
Ravenna was another Venice, and forewarn 
us of the days when Venice is to be another 
Ravenna. 

The narrow belt of the occupied Strand 
began to broaden and to thicken ; the- palaces 



Introduction 1 1 



increased on either side, shutting out the river 
and the fields ; then the houses began to jostle 
each other ; the poor little Roman bath, stone- 
cold in its niche, got gradually blocked up and 
hidden away, and had grown to be almost as 
much of a curiosity five centuries ago as it is 
in our own day ; the river was beginning to 
be more and more occupied by wharfs and 
warehouses ; the Westminster quarter was 
sending its offshoots down along the line of 
streets ; the City was sending its offshoots up 
along the line of river ; the Strand was turning 
from the Strand properly so called into the 
Strand improperly so called — as we have 
known it all our lives, and our grandfathers and 
grandmothers before us. Between certain 
palaces of nobles and shops of burghers there 
ran green and pleasant lanes down to the 
Thames — then, and for long after, a silver 
stream, and in the season hawthorn still 
blossomed in the lanes and honeysuckle made 
them fragrant. This was on the south side of 
the Strand. On the north side there were 
glimpses of the fields and the country — 



12 Charing Cross to St. Paul's 

glimpses growing more and more tantalising 
as time went on, and as the movement of 
civilisation trod down the old beauties and 
delights of the Strand. The Strand, how- 
ever, had magnificent compensation for its 
losses. It was like some rustic maiden who 
has been married by a prince : the rustic 
maiden wears no necklace of beads or chaplet 
of wild flowers any more, but she has a 
coronet on her head and a strinQ^ of diamonds 
round her neck ; she does not dance on the 
village green and under the maypole any 
longer, but she moves in the stately figures of 
the Court minuet. Which is the better part ? 
That would have to be left to the village 
maiden to tell for herself, if haply she could 
tell it, which she probably could not. The 
Strand ceased to be the green shore of the 
Thames, and became the highway of kings 
and of history. Along that Strand either 
way moved the stately procession of Eng- 
land's imperial life ; captive princes, captive 
kings, have passed along there ; every 
English sovereign — I believe I may say 



Introdtiction 1 3 



every one : is there a single exception ? — 
has passed in triumph along that favoured 
thoroughfare ; the funeral processions of 
queens have gone one v^ay, the funeral pro- 
cessions of heroes and conquerors have gone 
sometimes the one way and sometimes the 
other ; even down to our own prosaic days 
the Strand has been allowed to keep up its 
character as an imperial highway. I can re- 
member the funeral of the Duke of Welling- 
ton, that "most high and mighty prince," as he 
might well have been called — Marlborough 
was so called in the official records of his 
funeral pageantry. Men and women of only 
middle age can remember the wedding pro- 
cession of the Prince and Princess of Wales, 
and the thanksgiving ceremonial when the 
fever-stricken Prince was given back to life. 
All this kind of moving splendour the 
Strand has seen ; for this it has had to 
sacrifice its early countrified ways, its hedges, 
its flowers, and the river waves that melted 
on its banks. 

Of late years, perhaps, it is a little falling 



14 Charing Cross to St. PauTs 

away in its august adornments. The pro- 
cessions of princes are becoming infrequent ; 
we have no captive kings any more ; and 
when a foreign sovereign comes here of his 
own goodwill and pleasure he does not 
always care to fare in public array along the 
Strand. No set of devoted Stuartists now 
make their way along the Strand, and, sud- 
denly breaking out with appropriate emblems 
and devices on Ludgate Hill, vociferously 
proclaim the reign of James the Third. Even 
the Lord Mayor's Show begins to have less 
of a grip than it had upon the mind and the 
memory of the Strand — it only holds a sort 
of year-to-year lease of existence. It was, to 
be sure, revived and refurbished last year or 
the year before last, let us say, but who can 
tell whether the spirit of modernity — I have 
seen the word somewhere lately — or of econ- 
omy, or we know not what, may not suspend 
its appearance for a year or two, and after 
that interval, supposing it to come, what may 
not happen ? Has the Strand outlived its 
grand characteristic } " No longer steel-clad 



Introduction 1 5 



warriors ride along thy " — something or other 
— " shore." No, indeed, none such, except 
only the men in armour of the Lord Mayor's 
Show, and, alas ! who believes in them ? The 
morfe real, flesh-like, living they are, the more 
they are incredible and impossible ; the more 
significantly do they proclaim that the Strand 
has no longer anything to do with the Middle 
Ages. 

Well, perhaps the Strand is not altogether 
the worse for that — perhaps it is not wholly 
and merely a sufferer and a victim to the 
wrongdoing of time because it has lost 
the mail-clad warriors and even the proces- 
sions of kings. I can well remember reading 
in one of the earlier volumes of State Trials 
the story of some murder committed at the 
setting on of this or that great disguised — I 
mean concealed — personage, some personage 
carefully kept in the background. The murder 
was not found out for many days, and why, 
does my reader think ? Because the murdered 
body was hidden away " among the dunghills 
on the Strand at the end of Drury Lane." 



1 6 Charing Cross to St. PauVs 

Among the dunghills on the Strand a 
murdered corpse lying for days undiscovered ! 
Are we not on the whole somewhat better 
off now? If we miss — supposing we ever 
do miss — the mail-clad warriors and the 
triumphant or captive kings, have we not the 
better of it, seeing that we are free of the 
murdered bodies stowed away amid the dung- 
hills ? Then the Mohocks — those awful 
gangs of " swell " rowdies who amused them- 
selves by rolling women in casks down 
Ludgate Hill at midnight ; and "tipping the 
lion," that is, flattening the nose, for peaceful 
and honest citizens returning home belated ; 
and "pinking," and "sweating," and " tumb- 
lincr," and all the rest of it^is it not some- 
thing that we are free of these young " bloods" 
and their brutal practical jokes, and their 
torturing and witless buffoonery ? I may sa)-, 
perhaps, in order to be fair while I am deal- 
ing with this part of the history of London, 
that I believe there has been the most un- 
reasonable exaooreration about the stories of 
the London Mohocks, just as there has been. 



Introduction 1 7 



perhaps, about the perils of the Thames Em- 
bankment in our own times. The Mohocks 
frightened Swift. He writes, in one of his 
letters to Stella, that people in London were 
afraid tO stir out late at night because of them. 
The Spectator talks a good deal about 
them, and Gay, of course, has not left them 
unnoticed. Still, I cannot help believing, 
even from the very evidence of the period, 
that a few mad isolated pranks were ex- 
aggerated into a system of outrage, and that 
a brutal practical joke upon some wandering 
Paphian of Drury Lane was made to terrify 
respectable matrons and maids who were 
anxious to attend balls and parties late o' 
nights. If I am quite mistaken in this im- 
pression I should be only too glad that any 
one well acquainted with the London records 
and statistics of the time, such as they were, 
should point me to the trustworthy evidence 
which shows that the Mohocks were a really 
prolonged, and a systematic trouble to the 
London night-life of the time of Swift and 
Addison. 

c 



1 8 Charing Cross to St. Paiifs 

Even if, however, I should be right in my 
contention, that Mill not touch the point I 
strive to make when I insist that, on the 
whole, we who traverse the Strand have not 
lost utterly when we lost the mail-clad men 
and the processions of kings. Supposing, as 
I do suppose, that the doings and the dangers 
of the Mohocks were grossly exaggerated, 
what then ? The panic was a distinct trouble ; 
the scare was a very practical nuisance. We 
should not be much frightened just now if 
we heard of Mohock Q;anQ^s east of Charino^ 
Cross of nio^hts. We should qto to the 
Lyceum Theatre, and the Gaiety, and the 
Adelphi, and Drury Lane, and Covent 
Garden, and all the other theatres, just the 
same ; we should leave the police to look 
after us^and they would look after us — and 
the Mohocks, if they should present them- 
selves, would be simply " run in," and would 
get ever so many days' imprisonment when 
brought up at Bow Street next morning. 
Does medicevalism mean picturesqueness, and 
modernity comfort ? I do not venture to 



Introduction 1 9 



answer. And supposing it be so, which 
London — ■ mediaeval or modern — has the 
better part? "Alas!" as Hamlet says, "I 
know not." 



II 

CHARIXCx CROSS 

The Londoner as a rule never sees London. 
He never looks at it. He knows it all too 
well. He has grown used to it. He has 
given up looking at it and thinking about 
it. He may be very fond of it all the 
same. A man may be very fond of his 
dauohter, but if on coming: home alone some 
night he happens to see a light shining 
from the windows of her bedroom he does 
not stop beneath and contemplate the 
gleaming panes with eyes of reverential 
poetic love, as he used to contemplate the 
lioht in her mother's window Iouq- aQ-o, 
before he was married. So with the 
Londoner and London. He mav love the 



Charing Cross 2 1 

place, or, at all events, his own nook of it ; 
he may be happy with his friends and his 
cronies and his favourite haunts, and his 
dinners and clubs and theatres and Parlia- 
ment, and kll the rest of it ; but he goes 
along Pall Mall or the Strand and he sees 
nothing. The born Londoner is worst of 
all in that way. The resident Londoner 
who came to town from the provinces or 
from Ireland or Scotland remembers a time 
when he could not study London half enough 
for his own satisfaction, when every street 
had its own especial interest for him, and he 
looked at the houses as if he were inquiring 
into the riddle and the story of each of them. 
But he too subsides before long into the 
condition of the born Londoner, and he goes 
his daily way apathetic, and the Strand is a 
thoroughfare for him and Charing Cross is a 
crowded place where he has to dodge the 
omnibuses, and Strand and Charing Cross 
are nothing more to him. The monotony 
of his daily movement has made him blind 
to London, as the monotony of the snow 



2 2 Charing Cross to St. Paid's 

makes men blind while they are mounting 
the Alpine steeps. 

Happily there comes now and again a 
stranger with fresh, artistic eyes — an observer 
and a man of genius who re-creates London 
for us Londoners, and shows us what it 
really is — what it was to our own eyes while 
they could yet see it for themselves. Take, 
for example — a very remarkable example 
indeed — the drawings reproduced in this 
book, which are by the hand of a stranger. 
Mr. Pennell illustrates the street life of 
London from Charing Cross to St. Paul's. 
He reminds one of the familiar magician of 
the East who holds in his hand a little drop 
of ink, and somebody gazing steadily in sees 
there the realities of some scene and some 
life long unknown to him. Mr. Pennell 
takes his little drop of ink, and he dips his 
pen in it ; and behold, in a moment we are 
all gazing into the street life of London. 
We are more than gazing into it ; we are 
living in it — we are of it. These sketches 
were all evidently taken on the spot. How 



\ 



K 



X 






fj 5.U 



















FLOWER GIRLS AT CHARLNG CROSS 



Charing Cross 25 



else should they be taken ? — I can imagine 
some reader asking. Well, what I mean is 
that they were not taken by a man looking 
out of a window — say a man looking out of 
a window in Morley's Hotel, and sketch- 
ing composedly the crowds far below him. 
Nor were they taken by a man seated com- 
fortably in a carriage or a hansom cab 
stationary at the bottom of a street. Any 
one who will take the trouble to observe 
the sketches in the whole effect of each 
of them will see at once what I mean. 
These pictures come from the very middle 
of the crowd. A friend of mine made 
some capital Piccadilly sketches from a place 
of elevation on the roof of a cab ; but the 
sketches had all the appearance of that quiet 
contemplation, that study from the upper 
boxes, which such a position would naturally 
give. The painter was drawing something 
which, if I may put it so, had nothing 
to do with him. He was drawing the 
street life of Piccadilly as he might sit on 
one of the terraces at Berne and sketch 



26 Charing Cross to St. P mil's 



the outlines of the Oberland mountain - 
range. 

But look at these Charing Cross sketches. 
Why, you feel as if you could see the artist 
running and plunging through the crowd. 
I think I can see him taking his stand com- 
posedly in one of the " refuges," and there 
steadily working away at his sketch until 
he has finished it, every figure and every 
house, and then plunging in among the 
omnibuses and cabs and crowd again, and 
shouldering his way until he gets another 
favourable place and makes another sketch. 
How he must have loved to do it all ! How- 
he must have revelled in it ! How he has 
got the very atmosphere of each scene, the 
very life of each house! "The very houses 
seem asleep," says Wordsworth ; and he 
was quite right, because he was looking at 
a scene of London in the early dawn. But 
in these sketches — sketches of the midday, 
most of them— the houses are all broad 
awake. Every group in the street, every 
single figure even, has a business and a 



Ckariitg Cross 27 

story of its own. What would one not give 
for such a series of pictures of the Hfe of 
that London which Dickens knew and made 
so real ? That London is disappearing fast. 
There will soon have to be an edition of 
Dickens with copious explanatory notes on 
every page, or the younger readers will not 
know half the time what the author is 
talking about. Why, at this day a man or 
woman of twenty-one thinks of the Thames 
at Westminster as always bordered by a 
stately and somewhat monotonous embank- 
ment. What does he or she know about 
the rickety wharfs, the oozy old piers, the 
huge dark piles of warehouses, the tumble- 
down little old public-houses that once varie- 
gated the banks of the silent highway there } 
Even the elders forget all too soon how 
things were a few years ago. Only the 
other day I learned with much surprise — 
at first with a little or, indeed, not a little, 
incredulity — that the beadle of the Bur- 
lington Arcade is gone, that there has not 
been this long time back any beadle at the 



2 8 Charino; Cross to Sf. PaiiTs 

Burlington Arcade. Can this be so, or was 
saucy youth merely playing pranks with me ? 
Is he indeed gone, that stately, gorgeous 
creature who used to fill my young days 
with awe ? Why, he was always there when 
I was a young man, and I pass through the 
Burlington Arcade a good deal still, but I 
never doubted that my old friend the beadle 
was always there. To say I never missed 
him would not explain the condition of 
things ; of course, if I had missed him I 
should have found out all about him. I 
assumed him ; I took him for granted ; he 
was there for me, with a waistcoat which 
defied the hand of time and a cocked hat 
to which the gods had given immortal 
youth. And he is gone — has long been 
gone, they say. Who shall explain to the 
younger generation all about Northumberland 
House and the lion that used to surmount 
it — the lion that a credulous crowd was one 
day persuaded to believe it saw wagging 
its tail ? Already Temple Bar is beginning 
to be forgotten ; it will be disbelieved in by 




TRAFALGAR SQUARE 



Charing Cross 31 

the day after to-morrow or thereabouts. 
Soon a time will come when Londoners 
will take it for granted, if they think about 
the matter at all, that Addison may have 
sauntered along Shaftesbury Avenue, and 
that Sir Roger de Coverley may have put 
up at the Inns of Court Hotel. 

That was a digression. I come back to 
Charing- Cross and these sketches of streets 
and street life. They give a surprising 
impression of crowd and movement ; a 
nervous, retiring person almost shudders as 
he looks on them ; " I should not like to 
be hustling in that crowd," he thinks, "and 
dodging those cabs and omnibuses." In 
that masterpiece of farce-comedy — I do not 
know what else to call it — Ben Jonson's 
" Bartholomew Fair," the reader seems to 
feel the very dust of the fair getting into 
his eyes and his throat and making him 
thirsty. So in these sketches the confusion 
of the crowd makes a nervous man feel 
uncomfortable. He seems to be afraid to 
stand and quietly study them ; he feels as 



32 Charing Cross to St. Paul's 

if he could only get darting glimpses at 
them, as the artist himself must often have 
done. Some strange old picturesque front 
of a house strikes him much. Is there a 
house like that, he asks himself, a house 
like that so close to Charing Cross, where 
I thought everything was commonplace, 
and most things were new? He goes and 
tests the truth of the sketch by finding out 
the house. Yes, to be sure, there it is ; 
there is the quaint, picturesque old-world 
front with the carvings over its windows. 
It is there, and I pass the place every 
day, and I never saw it before. Some 
day one of us will cross Trafalgar Square, 
and, suddenly looking up in a moment of 
awakened consciousness, will become pos- 
sessed of the fact that the old National 
Gallery with its pepper-boxes is gone, and 
that some structure altogether different in 
style stands in its place. He will ask some 
benevolent passer-by about the matter, and 
will be told that the old building was taken 
down years ago. 
























0. 






CHARING CROSS 



D 



Charing Cross 35 



To a dreamy sort of personage like that 
— dreamy as a habit, but still interested 
in most things — these sketches of London 
ought to have an infinite charm. They 
give him the street life exactly as it is, 
but yet as he could not see it for himself; 
they give him the crowd without the dis- 
comfort of being actually in the crowd. If 
his dreams have a way of taking the form 
of stories and character studies, there are 
figures and groups enough here to feed 
him with material. Look at that young 
man who is standing to have his shoes 
blacked within sight of Eleanor's Cross. 
He is a well-made, well-set-up young man. 
He bends forward with eyes studiously 
turned downward. We cannot see his 
eyes, his back is turned to us ; but we can 
know quite well from the bend of his head 
that he is looking carefully down. What is 
he contemplating } — the process of blacking 
his boots which is being carried on by the 
spry little lad, whose whole character can 
be read in the shape of his head and in so 



36 Charing Cross to St. PauTs 

much of his nose as can be seen under the 
peak of his cap, his head being bowed over 
his work ? No, I don't think the young 
man is wholly absorbed in the shoe-cleaning 
process ; but I think his dress shows that 
he is from the country, and I don't fancy 
he likes being boot-blacked in the full sight 
of all Charing Cross, and so he looks down 
to hide his modesty. He is at the time of 
life when young men, especially from the 
country, really fancy that London is look- 
ing at them. I take this to be a very 
ingenuous, true-hearted young man. He 
is something in the engineering line, I 
fancy. I have a notion that he is staying 
at the Golden Cross hard by, and that he 
has just come out from the portals of that 
hotel, which must always have a tender 
interest for those who love David Copper- 
field. But I do not suppose that our young 
ensfineer went to the Golden Cross for the 
sake of David Copperfield — he is too young 
to care much about Dickens ; but if he has 
not a sweetheart in London then I know 




KIXG CHARLES'S STATUE 



Charing Cross 39 



nothing of the world of fiction. Why, he 
is thinking at this very moment what an 
awful thing it would be if she were to 
drive by just then, and see him standing 
there with his trousers tucked up and 
having his boots blacked. But why did 
he have his boots blacked in the street ? 
Why did he not have them looked to at 
the Golden Cross ? He did — why, of course 
he did. But do you not see that the day 
is very muddy ? Do you not observe the 
highly -tucked -up trousers of the careful 
man with the eyeglass who is picking his 
steps across the street ? Our youth came 
out from the Golden Cross spick and span 
as regards his boots, but as he was hurrying 
along the street an omnibus bore down upon 
him and drove him into a puddle, and it 
would take too much time to go back to 
the hotel, and he just came on the boot- 
cleaning boy, and he is in haste to go and 
meet his sweetheart, who will be walking 
by accident in a Covent Garden flower 
arcade, and he certainly would not go to 



40 Charing Cross to St. Pauls 

meet her in dirty boots ; and so you see how 
it all occurs. He will go to the Lyceum to- 
nio-ht ; he cannot see his sweetheart in the 
evening. Her people do not consider him 
quite up to her social level ; but I am per- 
suaded that he will get on, and will make a 
position for himself, and win the girl yet. 
You can see all this in his strono- shoulders 
and his general air of self-reliance. 

"Ah, bear in mind that garden was enchanted !" 

These words are from Edgar Poe's charm- 
ing verses, "To Helen." They explain how 
and why the poet came to understand all the 
phases of Helen's character, all the feelings 
of her heart, her "silently serene sea of 
pride," how boundless her ambition, yet 
" how fathomless her capacity for love." He 
only got a glimpse of her upturned face 
"and of her eyes upturned, alas! in sorrow" 
— one midnight in a garden, years ago. 
How did he come to learn all about her and 
to understand her in that moment's glance ? 
He explains it thus — " Bear in mind that 



.s-^-"^ ■'••'' ^i ^^4=^ 




Mte": _-iiO' 









i; 1 . /W 






S^^rt^A^-^*"'^ ^^SC^^ 




i^^^-'m?x" J' 



^es:;_r-x^.3 








'tW«iM5^^^5 






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Chariiio; Cross . 43 



garden was enchanted ! " .So I say of the 
streets ol Lf)ndon — in this particular instance, 
of Charing Cross. Bear in mind that the 
scene is enchanted, I shall go on this 
assumption all the time I am reading London 
street life through these sketches. That is 
how one comes to learn so easily the whole 
story of our young engineer, and even to 
know that he is an engineer. Can we not 
t(,'ll something of the story of that sedate; and 
carefully -made -up man, in the drawing on 
page T,y, who is crossing the street and holds 
a little child by the hand ? I Ic is a widower, 
clearly, and one who, I think, will never 
marry again. Idiere is something of a set 
and s(juare resolve; about his prosaic, practical 
appearance which seems to tell of a man who 
will bear his loss bravely and not make; 
futile attempt to repair it. How entirely 
different a picture is given by the other man, 
on page 33, who, with a little girl, is cross- 
ing the street somewhere near the; young 
engineer! This man is jaunty, bright, very 
well dressed, very well satisfied with himself 



44 Charing Cross to St. PauTs 

Either he is a young married man rather 
proud of walking out with his child and of 
beinof allowed to take care of her all alone, 
or the child is only a little sister of his — but 
this latter theory somehow does not quite 
satisfy me. No ; I am sure he is a married 
man, and his wife is well and happy, but has 
not been able to come out with him, and he 
has taken the little girl to be his companion. 

What different ways people have of 
crossing a street ! Some men have such 
nerves that they can wind in and out among 
the cabs, and carts, and omnibuses, in 
imminent momentary danger which makes 
a mere looker-on tremble, and they never 
seem to think that they are in danger, but 
avoid every impingement and collision with 
the easy skill of a bull-fighter. See that man 
there — the wheel of a hansom has just 
brushed him and he steps ever so little aside 
and is unharmed. But the next moment he 
has come right in the way of a tearing 
omnibus, and the driver halloos to him and 
he coolly looks up and then allows just 



m. 







ffifl 






'fi'i'^'il'" ™ '■■■>:'■ ■ « \! (' ^ 



bT. MAKTIN S IN TIIK FIELU.S 



Charing Cross 47 



enough space for the omnibus to pass, 
while at the same time he contrives to 
keep his head barely clear of the huge planks 
that are being dragged on a great cart at 
his other side. The special danger of the 
London streets is in the variety of the 
wheeled traffic. You manage to get safely 
in front of an omnibus and quite clear of it, 
but you had not noticed the hansom cab 
which was coming rapidly along on the 
other side of the omnibus, and which now 
darts between you and the sidewalk for 
which you were making. While you are 
trying to dodge the cab, behold a mail-cart 
threatens you from one direction and a 
bicycle throbs its shrill flight and rattles 
its bell at you from another. The traffic up 
and down Broadway, New York, is prob- 
ably greater than that of any part of London, 
but then it is nearly all heavy traffic — 
waggons and street cars and tramcars. There 
are few hansoms, few light carriages, and 
therefore few surprises for the pedestrian 
trying to cross from one side to the other. 



48 Charing Cross to St. Paur s 

To do our cab-drivers, especially the drivers 
of hansom cabs, justice, it must be said that 
they are wonderfully skilful and careful. If 
they drove with the recklessness of the 
Parisian drivers, London streets would be 
covered with the killed and wounded. Few 
sights inspire me more with curious admira- 
tion than to see a London gamin — perhaps 
a newsboy, perhaps a lad who gathers up 
street refuse — to see the joyous recklessness 
with which he disports himself among the 
wheels of the carriages and the hoofs of the 
horses. It is as if he could not be hurt by 
them, as if the danger that existed for others 
was no dano^er at all for him. He reminds 
me of the boy or girl of some far southern 
island disporting in the long sea-rollers flung 
in upon the beach. This southern island 
child is amphibious ; has no more thought of 
danger from the waves than of cianger from 
the pebbles on the beach ; tumbles about as 
easily as if swimming in the sea and racing 
on the shore were just the same thing. So 
with the London street gamin. He is quite 



Charing Cross 49 



used to running in and running 'about amid 
the wheels and the hoofs, and he doesn't 
mind, bless you, and as I heard one of them 
say one day, " There ain't no harm going 
to happen to me." And I don't believe 
that any harm does happen to him in that 
way. 

But look at some women crossing a street, 
I do not say that all women are bad at it. 
Some are composed, self-possessed, and 
majestic ; they sail in and out among the 
cabs and omnibuses like stately yachts 
through a fleet of ironclads. Such a woman 
is now crossing near the Strand end of 
Morley's Hotel (see page 41); she holds a 
little girl by the hand and guides her ; she 
moves slowly, steadily, hardly seeming to 
look either to the right or to the left, and 
yet with her calm eyes wide open to every- 
thing that concerns herself and her charge. 
Look at her — is she not a typical London 
figure ? See how well she is dressed — with 
her fur-trimmed jacket tight over her firm, 
opulent bust, her skirts kilted exactly to the 

K 



50 Charing Cross to St. Paiifs 

riorht heis^ht for a walk in London streets, her 
bonnet of the style next to the very newest 
— she would not think it quite right to have 
the very, very newest style of bonnet — her 
veil is drawn tightly across the upper part 
of her face and reaches just down to the tip 
of her nose ; she is proper, prim, sensible, 
conscientious, innocent — probably never had 
a wrono- thought in her life ; her views, 
indeed, are limited — propriety is everything 
with her ; she is the sort of woman who 
would not consider it by any means proper 
to wear very smart and lacey petticoats or 
other such garments ; she has not two ideas 
in her head, and neither she nor anybody 
else would know what she could do with 
them if she had. Just now, however, I am 
watching her as she crosses the street, and I 
am full of admiration for her cool, successful 
composure. That is the woman who would 
not wince in a cold shower-bath when she 
had just pulled the string. I need not 
follow her in her passage — she will get 
across quite safely. But see how other 



Charing Cross 5 i 



women — the great majority of women — 
conduct themselves when they have to make 
a more or less perilous crossing. They 
begin with a sudden dart, then they think 
better of it, and come to a dead stand in the 
middle of the street just at the wrong time ; 
then they try to run back again, and their 
affrighted gambolings sometimes stop the 
march of a streetful of traffic. I have seen 
women on the footpath of some perfectly 
quiet and little-frequented street pause a 
moment and take a lonq; and anxious look 
up and down the thoroughfare, satisfy them- 
selves that no vehicle of any kind is in sight 
either way, and then gather up their drapery 
in the most awkward and ungainly fashion 
and run as fast as their legs can carry them 
across to the other side, which they reach 
all panting and red with the air of ship- 
wrecked people who have just managed to 
get on to a rock. I have seen women pause 
and look anxiously round and let the moment 
pass when there was a safe gap in the traffic, 
and then, just as the noisy waves begin to 



S2 CharinQ- Cross to St. Pauls 



'.!> 



roll on again, suddenly make the dart at the 
wrong time, to the imminent peril of their 
lives. Worst of all is when there are two 
or three women together. They start off at 
the same time, but the moment they are in 
motion each seems to take a different view 
of the duties of the occasion. One thinks 
she had better rush on ; another espies 
danger in that way, and quickly resolves to 
run back : a third comes to the conclusion 
that the best thincr to do is to remain in the 
middle of the street. If each would be 
content to follow her own impulse and do 
nothing else it would not be quite so bad, 
but each wants to coerce her companions to 
do what she is doing, and there is a scene 
of pulling and pushing and arguing, and how 
any one of them ever comes alive out of that 
peril is more than I can understand. I do 
not want to put undue limitation on the 
riofhts of women, but I must sav that I do 
not think a woman — at all e\ents a modern 
and civilised woman — ever ouoht to run. 
Atalanta. of course — well and Q;ood — she was 










^■ 






^Ji^S' 



;e ' 






.r: 



Charing Cross 55 

ci sort of professional, and she got hcrscH up 
for the task ; she did not wear loni^ skirts 
and high-heeled shoes and a bonnet with a 
h'ttle shrubbery or orchard or aviary on the 
top of it. Camiha, too, had a right to run — 
her tunic was short, and the grasses did not 
bend under her lightsome buskins — at least 
so the poet says, and poets ought to know 
— but the woman of modern civilisation and 
dress ought never to run. 

We see a good deal of the soldier in 
these sketches. He is mostly a cavalryman, 
with his cap on the side of his head and 
his curious air of lounging alertness, not 
exactly swagger — there is too much self- 
complacency and self-content in him to call 
for tlie airs of a man who feels that he is 
bound to swagger. Can one wonder that the 
cavalryman is such a hero and idol to the 
servant-girl } Look at him, with his scarlet 
coat, his jingling spurs, his sabre, his 
moustache, his gold lace, his shiny buttons, 
his smart jacket, his tall, well-knit figure, 
and put yourself, if you can, in poor Mary 



56 CJiaring Cross to St. Pauf s 

Jane's place, and think what a god of her 
idolatry he well may be ! Think of the 
butcher's boy and the baker's boy who are 
her usual morning callers, and think how they 
would look beside that gorgeous soldier! 
Is there any corresponding womanly 
splendour which could equally dazzle the 
butcher's boy or the baker's boy ? Does any 
woman ever come in his way as supremely 
dazzling and overawing as the cavalryman 
is to the maiden of the kitchen ? Let us try 
to think. A ballet girl, perhaps, with her 
gauzy petticoats, and her pink legs, and her 
powdered and rouged face, and her smiles, 
and her suppleness, and her general splendour 
of attire ? Well, no doubt she must seem to 
him like some creature from another sphere. 
And then the circus -riding woman in the 
velvet bodice and the short skirts and the 
pretty buskins, who stands upright on the 
horse's back and leaps through all the crash- 
ing hoops, and then at intervals drops down 
into the saddle again with pretty pantings 
of fatigue and bewitching little shudders of 



Charing Cross 57 



exhaustion ; surely she must seem a vision 
of youth, beauty, and spangles — a plump 
phantom, if there could be such a thing, of 
delight ? Yes, we may admit the ballet 
girl and the circus-riding girl ; we may admit 
that they must in their radiance shine as 
dazzlingly on the butcher's boy and the 
baker's boy as even the cavalryman shines 
upon Mary Jane. But look at the difference. 
Where, I should like to know, is the ballet 
girl or the circus-riding woman who would 
condescend to go out for a walk with the 
young butcher or baker ? He might as well 
expect Miss Ethel Newcome or Miss Mary 
Anderson to go out a-walking with him. 
So these divine creatures are divine indeed 
for him ; they are stars that shine on him 
from a far sky, not lamps that burn to light 
his lowly way. But Mary Jane walks out 
with her cavalryman on the Sunday, leans 
upon his heroic arm, looks up lovingly into 
his eyes, sits beside him on the bench in one 
of the parks, is " a part of his life," as the 
heroines in the novels put it. Therefore, 



58 C/iarinj^- Cross to St. Pant's 

Mary Jane's experience with her soldier 
lover is an experience that, to my mind, is 
quite unique. Aladdin with the princess was 
not in i-t, if a comparison had to be made. 
I begin to feel sorry for all poor young 
princesses. They could not by any human 
possibility find any mortal lover so delight- 
fully above them in heroic splendour as 
INIary Jane has found in her cavalryman. 
Is she not on the Sunday the happiest of 
human beings .'' 

Very likely she is, but I once caught a 
glimpse of a face at Charing Cross one hot 
day of last summer which expressed a greater 
concentration of happiness than I had ever 
seen on the human countenance before, or 
perhaps shall ever see there again. It was 
a hot day — glowingly, gloriously hot. Out- 
side a public-house door stood the driver of 
a four-wheeler, his cab waiting for him. He 
held in one hand a pot of beer from which 
he had been taking a deep draught. He 
held the vessel sideways in his hand, and 
seeing that there was a good deal left he 



ml 



X 







Charing Cross 6 1 

sl()i)|)C(l lor ;i nioniciiL to think over ihc 
joy of lh(! occasion and to lake, it in and 
become equal to it. Ilun'c lie was, ha[)i)y 
in the past, in tlie [)resent, in the near future. 
The pleasures of memory, the pleasures of 
hope, the pleasures of imai^ination ! Think 
of that first dee[), lon_o- draught! I low de- 
lightful in the men; memory ! That man 
would not a1)at(; oik; jot ol the heat ol that 
day lest in doin^' so he might los(i any of 
the joy of the deep drink. Hut then, in this 
present interval of delij^ht, and whik; he is 
allowing the witch(;ry of the first draught 
to gladden his veins and his s{M1S(;s, comes 
the knowledge that there is a still deeper 
draught yet awaiting his good pleasure. So 
he pauses in his drink, slants the pot a little, 
looks down tend(;rly into its dark foam- 
curdled ])ool, and still thrilling with the joy 
of the past drink, antici[)ates lh(; rapture of 
the drink that is soon to comc^ No, I nc^ver 
saw in life or in art any human face so 
beaming, so radiant with an all -ineffable 
delight, as the fac(; of that cabman on that 



62 Charing Cross to St. PaiiFs 

hot day at Charing Cross with his porter- 
pot in his hand. Have we got him in any 
of these sketches ? No, not exactly. We 
have not got him ; but we have got his cab. 
There it stands in the sketch of the street 
near the Eleanor's Cross. The cab, yes ; 
but why not the cabman ? Can you not 
guess ? Why, of course, because the artist, 
Hke a true man of genius, recognised the 
fact that no mortal hand or earthly pencil 
could reproduce the expression of that 
measureless content — and the joy of the 
cabman's countenance, like the grief of 
Agamemnon's kingly face, was purposely 
evaded by art, and left unillustrated. Art 
bowed to each, sighed, and turned deliber- 
ately, nobly, resignedly away. 



Ill 

THE STRAND 

I REGRET not being a man of fortune. I am 
sincere in the expression of that regret. I 
regret the fact because among other reasons 
1 am denied the luxury of studying such 
streets as the Strand from the summit of an 
omnibus. A man whose time is his only 
money cannot afford so costly a joy. The 
top of the omnibus is the seat for the idle — 
for those to whom time is a thing to be killed 
like game, or for the hard-worked and poor, 
whose hours after work is done are, in the 
money sense, valueless. But a man like my- 
self may not afford omnibuses. He must take 
the frequent hansom. If he goes about much 
he lives half his life in hansoms. He has 



64 Charing Cross to St. Paur s 

to do it. It would not be satisfactory to 
save a few shillings by taking omnibuses, 
and as a reward for his economy have to put 
up with the loss of a few guineas. I have 
not been on the top of an omnibus for years 
and years, but I have many pleasant memo- 
ries of long, delightful journeys thus made^ 
in days when all the world was younger, 
and seemed to me to be a good deal less 
in a hurry, I gaze with envy on the people 
who sit enthroned on the roof of the penny 
omnibus in Mr. Pennell's lively sketch. How 
characteristic are the faces of these people ! 
See the rather pretty young woman with her 
veil drawn midway down her nose, and the 
foreign gentleman, with the moustache and 
the eyeglasses, and the self-assertive hat. 
And look at the elderly woman inside the 
'bus. I should like to be on the top of that 
omnibus and to go whithersoever it went, 
and then to come back w^ith it again. I used 
to love that sort of thing when I was a very 
vouno; man studvino^ London as a stranger 
— the only way in which London is really to 



The Strand 65 



be studied. It used to be a favourite way of 
mine to hail the first omnibus I saw and 
scramble on to the roof, which was a feat 
of gymnastics in those days — we had no 
spiral staircases to our omnibuses then — a feat 
no woman ever ventured to accomplish, or 
even attempt — and let it carry me whither it 
would. I well knew that it could not carry 
me to any region or any street which would 
not be full of interest for me. I should like 
to make some expeditions of that kind even 
now, and survey the streets and the crowds, 
and call up recollections of other such rides 
long ago, and revive reminiscences in every 
place. 

I knew, long ago, of two brothers, young 
lads, in a seaport town in one of these islands, 
who in all their love of the river and the sea, 
and their boat and the broken waves, still 
yearned above all things to see London. 
London was to them simply the London of 
Shakespeare and of Dickens and Thackeray. 
They used to spend hours in picturing to 
themselves the delights of living in London. 



66 C/iariiio- Cross to St. J\n(/'s 

O 

They proposed to live in some pretty suburb, 
and to go to town every morning and re- 
turn every evening on the top of an omnibus. 
This was their modest idea of life ; they did 
not stop to think oi' any particular quarter of 
London as more desirable to live in than 
another ; the point of the thing was the fact 
of their living in London, and in that sense 
being the owners of it — able to go about it 
and study it and be happy in it. It was a 
sort oi' London mania which was very con- 
tagious in those days among boys who had 
never been in London, and it got its chief 
impulse from Dickens. The elder of the 
boys came to London and settled there, and 
has been living there a great many years, 
and of course sees little or nothing of London 
now. The younger lad never saw London 
at all. He went out to the Lhiited States to 
make a fortune, with the express intention of 
returning to Europe and living in London. 
He never returned. The Civil War broke 
out, and although he never was wounded, 
yet in the damp night-watches and in the 



tM,^, 



:> 









^^^^^^4^:-^i}51?^:.^/^ ^ iff" I 



11 w^ 






IN T/IK STKANI) 



The Strand 69 



intrenchments the seeds were sown of the 
disease of which he died. And so he never 
saw London — never once. And I, passing 
through London this way and that, and 
wholly without noticing the streets and 
houses, suddenly happen to remember these 
old-time fancyings and aspirations, and to 
see him. There are a good many ghosts 
about the Strand that the Strand never sees. 
The longer one lives in London, the more 
the Strand comes to be a phantom-haunted 
thoroughfare. 

Now, take the region which Mr. Pennell 
has chosen to picture in the sketch I have 
already mentioned — the sketch which brings 
in the penny omnibus. It is in the close 
neighbourhood of Somerset House. To me 
that part of the Strand is haunted by many 
ghosts — "the forms that men spy with the 
half-shut eye." Some memories of a vanished 
Bohemia of literature and art haunt me as 
I look on Mr. Pennell's sketch. Do I not 
remember a gifted, eccentric Bohemian who 
used to haunt a restaurant on the left side of 



70 Charing Cross to St, PaitVs 

the Strand as you go eastward to St. Paul's, 
and almost exactly opposite to the spot where 
Mr. Pennell's policeman checks the too reck- 
less advance of one of J\Ir. Pennell's life-like, 
livinof hansom cabs ? Do I not remember the 
account he used to give of his effort to find 
"a basis of operations" for the livelihood of 
the day } When he had twopence he was 
ready to start. He made for this particular 
restaurant, and he ordered a cup of coffee. 
One could get a cup of coffee for twopence 
in those days — can one now ? I do not know ; 
I do not drink coffee. There he had his 
basis of operations. He lingered over his 
coffee until some Bohemian friend lounged 
in, who, seeing him, invited him to have a 
drink. My hero declined, was pressed, 
declined again, and then compromised by 
saying he didn't mind accepting a veal-and- 
ham pie. So there he is started. With a 
veal-and-ham pie and a cup of coffee, a man 
who can digest such food is prepared to 
begin the world. Then, later on, another 
friend drops in, and our hero is now suffi- 




THE STRAND 



The Strand 7^ 



ciently fortified to accept a pint of half-and- 
half. Then he starts out in pursuit of work. 
He drops in upon editors and sub-editors, he 
pays a visit to publishers ; perhaps he gets 
an order for some job of literary work — 
perhaps he even gets payment for some job 
already done — and then he goes to his rooms, 
or his room, wherever the location may be, 
and if he has work to do he does it, and 
if he has had a cheque he goes back with a 
light heart to the restaurant I have described 
and he orders a dinner, and if any of his 
friends be round, he stands a dinner bravely, 
and so pays off the frequent veal-and-ham 
pies and the pints of half-and-half, and he is 
started in the world once again. It will not 
matter if for another week he is impecunious, 
he will not be as Dr. Johnson subscribed 
himself, " Impransus" — he will not be in the 
condition of wanting a dinner. Only he 
must have his basis of operations to b(!gin 
with — he has his code of honour like another. 
He will not go into that favourite haunt 
without the means of calling for something 



74 Charing Cross to St. PaitT s 

at once and of paying for it on the nail. 
With that to begin with he is safe. I think 
with a genuine pleasure that it was my happy 
chance on more than one occasion to advance 
the modest sum which enabled him fairly to 
enter the day's battle of life. He was a man 
of principle : he never sought to borrow more 
...an was needed to lay down the basis of 
operations. He is dead long since. Earth 
lie light upon his grave — that is, if he cares 
whether it lies light or heavy. He made 
life lie more lightly than it otherwise might 
have done for many of us in those far-oft 
days when the Strand was yet a wilderness 
of possibilities, a garden of romance, a battle- 
field from which one mio^ht come back a 
conquering hero, or on which one might, like 
my poor friend, "yield his broken sword to 
Fate the Conqueror." I do not suppose 
that sort of bitter struggle for life goes on 
now among the younger men who are fight- 
ing their way into London literature. I 
hope not. There are so many more news- 
papers and magazines of all kinds that fair 



The Strand 75 



employment ought to be got much more 
easily now than it was then. I am glad if 
all the old irregular days of literature are 
gone. I am entirely in favour of regularity 
and order ; but it must be owned that the 
gipsy is artistically a much more interesting 
personage than the beadle, or even • ::he 
policeman. 

" Hallo, my fancy ! whither wilt thou 
go ? " I have been wandering away from 
Mr. Pennell's sketches of to-day's London 
into a London of I do not want to say how 
many years ago. Anyhow, it was a London 
when Thackeray, and Dickens, and Mark 
Lemon, and John Leech, and Shirley Brooks, 
and Leicester Buckingham, and Edward 
Whitty were still alive. But although one 
ought to keep to the Strand of the present, 
one cannot do it if he has any memories. 
The real and the unreal, the present and 
the past, get so mixed up that they cannot 
be kept asunder. Why, there is not a 
house, not a shop, we pass on our way 
eastward from Charing Cross to St, Paul's, 



76 Charing Cross to St. Panl's 

that has not a story and an association for 
me — a story and an association connected 
with some individuality of man or woman 
to which I could put a name. Stop me 
at any house you please on either side of 
the Strand, and I shall have something to 
tell you associated with that particular house 
and none other. Perhaps I have never 
crossed its threshold : what does that matter ? 
I met some one, saw some one pass, just 
outside that shop ; some great man, perhaps, 
whose face I then looked on for the first 
time, and do you think I could ever forget 
that shop ? See ! from the windows of that 
house near Exeter Hall I saw Kossuth go by 
— saw that serene, majestic face, then one of 
the handsomest faces one could look on — 
saw him go by with the adoring crowd about 
him. He was indeed the lion of a season 
then — Kossuth then, Stanley the other day 
— and in between how many and in what a 
strange succession ! The Emperor of the 
French one day, and Garibaldi another, 
and the Shah, and the Czar, and Buffalo 




KXETEK HALL 



The Strand 79 



Bill ! Not a spot along the whole length 
of the Strand but I associate it with some 
name and face of a passing celebrity. Just 
there, at the spot where Wellington Street 
touches the south side of the Strand, I saw 
Dickens for the last time. They have a 
saying in New York that if you take your 
stand on a certain part of Broadway, you 
will see everybody you want to see. The 
same thing might have been said, and much 
more aptly, of the Strand at one time. 
Perhaps it is not quite the same now. 
Westward the course of celebrity takes its 
way. 

Exeter Hall ! I have mentioned Exeter 
Hall, and here is the place itself as shown 
by Mr. Pennell. Exeter Hall is an institu- 
tion ; it has a history ; its history ought to 
be written, I think the book would take 
— "The History of Exeter Hall." Forty 
years must have gone by since Macaulay 
roused a storm of anger against him by his 
famous allusion to "the bray of Exeter 
Hall." That was in the time when Exeter 



8o C/iariiig Cross to St. Pants 

Hall was associating itself mainly with move- 
ments against the Pope and the Jesuits, 
and against the political emancipation of 
the Jews. But Exeter Hall, apart from 
questions of creed altogether, has been the 
nursery of many a noble agitation in a 
good cause. The first time I ever heard 
Mr. Henry Ward Beecher speak was at a 
meeting in Exeter Hall. It was while the 
Civil W^ar was ooino- on in America, and 
he had come over to plead the cause of the 
North. The meeting was got up by the 
friends of the North, but the Southern cause 
was very popular in London society then, 
and there were numbers of the advocates of 
the South in the hall that nioht. Beecher's 
speech was rudel)-, and even savagely, 
interrupted in the beginning, but before 
long he made his opponents listen to him. 
I think Beecher was the most dexterous and 
powerful platform speaker I ever listened 
to, and that night he was put upon his 
mettle. His self-possession was superb; 
his good-humour unconquerable ; his voice 



/-v-r-3.'^."--,^, 



I , t'- 






'I few 




















■:-mM 




TKKKV S -I'lIKA IKK 

G 



The Strand 83 



splendid ; his readiness of reply was as the ex- 
plosion following the spark. He was making 
some allusion to religion in the North, when 
some one sarcastically called out, " Religion 
and war ! " meaning to imply thereby, no 
doubt, that religious nations do not carry 
on war. Beecher caught at the interruption. 
"Religion and war,'*" he exclaimed; "and 
what is the national emblem borne by the 
flag of England ? Is it not the cross upon 
the field of blood?" At that time there 
was felt some dissatisfaction in England 
about an over- enthusiastic welcome given 
to certain Russian princes in the United 
States. We were then full of horror at the 
suppression of the Polish rebellion, and we 
hated the Russians. A voice called out 
during one of Beecher's thrilling sentences, 
"What about the Russians?" Beecher 
understood the meaning of the question, and 
he gave it a prompt reply. " I suppose," 
he said in a grave, deep tone, "you mean 
to condemn some of our great folks in my 
country because they seem to be coquetting 



84 Charing Cross to St. PanF s 

with the Russians who enslave the Poles ? 
You are grieved that they should do so. 
Well, so am I ; and you will all the better 
understand how grieved we feel when your 
great folks coquette with the Southerners 
who enslave the negroes." The reply was 
all the more effective because it assumed 
the perfect good faith of the interruption, 
and admitted a sympathy with its purpose. 

How well Mr. Pennell has rendered the 
austere aspect of Exeter Hall ! No doubt 
he draws every scene exactly as he sees it 
and finds it — but if we did not know this we 
might be inclined to believe that he had 
exercised a little poetic fancy in making the 
very passers-by applicable in appearance to 
the character and the associations of the 
building. Observe the man with the strictly 
sleek hat and the shaven face and the eye- 
glass, looking indeed in some ways a good 
deal like a certain distinguished statesman 
and debater who has lately been occupying a 
very prominent and peculiar position. But 
this gentleman in the street picture, how 



The Strand 85 

entirely in harmony he is with the aspect of 
Exeter Hall ! He is so primly well dressed, 
so very sedate and proper. And the cab- 
men, one this way, two that, drive slowly by 
as if they were passing a church during 
service-time. Contrast that scene with the 
look of the little crowd round the Gaiety, 
where, as we see, "Faust up to Date" was 
still going on. To be sure this latter crowd 
is a crowd attracted by " Faust up to Date " 
— it is a Gaiety crowd altogether. Where 
the Gaiety door is, there will the Johnnies 
and chappies be. But the Exeter Hall 
scene is a happy accident, for there does not 
seem to be any meeting going on just then 
inside, and the chance of street traffic 
enabled the artist to make the whole sketch 
a piece of harmony. It is worth while to 
notice the different appearance and manner 
of two men who are passing the door of the 
Gaiety, but do not belong to the crowd. 
They are much more in the foreground : of 
one we see only the head and shoulders. 
He is well dressed, but there is something 



86 Charing Cross to St. PaiiVs 



distinctly provincial about him. He turns to 
look at the crowd with interest and sym- 








»iillr''j l'J■WJJtJM^»'^"«^(^^''* ^ '^' '"^ *»"' ^' '** »»(i«tn«''«i(it>wili«*k ':~^A,^|)ll^ll 



Mm M 



^" ^> 



THIC GAIKTY 



pathy. He is not going in himself; he has .J' 
some appointment which takes him else- 
where ; but he would go in if he could. Yet 
he is not in any disappointed mood. I am 



The Strand 87 

sure he likes well to _i;o where he is going, and 
does not envy those who have places in the 
Gaiety. Only he is a distinct sym[)athiser — 
he has been there before, and is sure to go 
again some night before he leaves town. 
But now look at the man with the soft felt 
hat, the close-cropped hair, and the mous- 
tache and beard. He goes grimly, morosely 
on, and never turns one glance on the 
frivolous little crowd round the Gaiety door. 
His mood is not in sympathy with such 
doings. He holds his mouth firmly shut ; 
he looks straight before him in a dogged 
sort of way. Who is he, and what is the 
matter with him.'* Is he an artisan of the 
better class on strike ^. Is he a conspirator ? 
Is he a man of naturally stern mood who 
hates amusement of all kind } I rather lean 
to the theory of the conspirator. He is one 
of some foreign fraternity, and something is 
in preparation about which he has no great 
hope, and he passes along the Strand brood- 
ing over it, and does not even know that 
there is a crowd of pleasure-seekers obstruct- 



88 Charing Cross to St. Paufs 

ing a part of the pavement. He moves 
along as unnoticed by them as his purpose 
is unknown to them. He and the young 
man from the country will pass each other 
closely in another second or two, but they 
have no more to do with each other than two 
ships that pass wide-parted on the ocean. 

One could spin a little story out of almost 
every figure in these sketches — ^just as one 
could out of almost each separate figure in 
the actual life of the Strand. Because the 
artist has made each of his figures so full of 
life, so living, and where there is life there is 
story, as surely as where there is substance 
there also is shadow. But whether the life 
be the substance and the story the shadow, 
or the story the substance and the life only 
the poor shadow, I do not venture to say. 
It would carry one too far away to try to 
work out that problem. There is a figure, 
for instance, in the sketch which contains the 
omnibus — a figure ready-made for a story. 
It is the fioure of a man who is crossinQf to 
the north side of the Strand, close to where 




VVKLI.INGTUN .Vi KKK 1 



The Strand 91 

the policeman checks the cab. There is a 
keen, cold March wind blowing ; you can see 
that it is so by the manner in which the man 
keeps his hands deep set in his pockets, and 
by the shuddering outlines of his gaunt 
figure. He is very poorly dressed — those 
trousers and those boots speak eloquently, 
far too eloquently, the tale of " Hard-up." 
The whole sketch is only a few black 
touches, but we get the man complete and 
living, and we can easily find out his story. 
He has seen better days. He started in life 
well, but indolence first and misfortune after 
told against him, and he was never a man to 
fight stoutly against enemies, and if Fate 
stared hard into his face to stare sternly back 
at her — and so he succumbed and went 
down and down. Fate is very cowardly ; 
she delights to inflict chastisement on those 
who readily submit to her ; and on the ill- 
booted heels of this poor man "unmerciful 
disaster followed fast and followed faster." 
There was a girl once who loved him, 
shabby poor rascal as he looks now — she 



92 Charing Cross to St. PaiLls 

loved him and would have risked her happi- 
ness with him, but he had no ambition and 
he had no real courage, and she saw all this, 
and turned away disappointed — and she is 
happily married now, and only sometimes 
remembers the good-for-nothing lover of 
former days — the man with the old boots 
and with his hands in his pockets. See, 
even against the March wind he has not the 
courage to stand up stiff and defiant. He 
cowers and cringes before it as he cowered 
and cringed before other antagonists, and 
this is what he has come to. Let him pass ; 
let us not follow him to his lonely home : no 
one could do any good for him ever again. 

We get more than one impression of the 
Lyceum in these sketches. We see it by day- 
light, we see it by lamplight. The Lyceum, 
like Exeter Hall, is an institution, only of a 
different kind, and ought to have its history. 
My first recollection of the Lyceum goes back 
to the days of Charles Mathews and Madame 
Vestris. I was new to London then, and I 
had never seen such actino- as that of Charles 




THI-: LYCEUM 



The Strand 95 



Mathews. I have seen a good many actors 
In a good many countries since that time, but 
I have never seen any one who could surpass 
Charles Mathews in light comedy. He holds 
in my recollection a place absolutely distinct, 
apart, entirely to himself. However, 1 am 
now discoursing not of Charles Mathews ex- 
clusively, but only of Charles Mathews as a 
figure in the history of the Lyceum, Then 
there comes a blank in my memory for some 
years, and Charles Mathews has ceased to be 
associated with the Lyceum, and all London 
that cares about acting at all is rushing to 
the Lyceum to see another Charles — Charles 
Fechter — act in " Ruy Bias." What a sen- 
sation that was ! " Yesterday I was your 
servant; to-day I am your executioner!" 
How the pit rose at these words, and the 
magnificent gesture which gave effect to 
them ! The Lyceum then fairly conquered 
Fashion. For at that time Fashion in 
London had given up going to what we 
call "the theatre," in the ordinary sense, and 
only professed to go to the Opera. But 



96 Charing Cross to St. Paulas 

Fechter, with his success, seized the heads 
of Fashion's horses, and turned the carriage 
round, and compelled it to land its master 
and mistress at the doors of the Lyceum 
Theatre. Then came "The Duke's Motto," 
which delighted Fashion even more than 
" Ruy Bias " had done. The unspeakably 
p^allant and o-raceful bearinQ- of the hero when 
he was playing his own part ; the marvellous 
subtlety and craft when he was playing the 
part of the hunchback ; the exquisite grace 
of Kate Terry, then in all the brightness and 
freshness of youth ; the winning archness of 
Carlotta Leclercq, and the brilliant closing 
scene, "ringed with a flame of fair faces and 
splendid with swords," all this charmed the 
town with a new and delightful sensation. 
Then came the " Hamlet" over which there 
was so much controversy — the Hamlet of 
Delaroche, the Hamlet of Goethe, the 
Hamlet of the flaxen locks. That was the 
zenith of Fechter's fame ; the rest was Q-radual 
descent. The last time I saw Fechter was 
at a dinner of the " Saturday Club " in 



The Strand 97 

Boston, Massachusetts. Members of the 
club were allowed on certain clays to intro- 
duce each a guest to the dinner ; Fechter 
was the guest of Longfellow, I of Emerson. 
Wendell Holmes was there. But I am 
wandering away from the Lyceum. 

Years go on, and there is another Hamlet 
in possession of the Lyceum, with another 
Miss Terry for the fair Ophelia ; and Irving, 
too, has conquered Fashion, and made it a 
captive at the wheels of his chariot. For 
a while he disappears — is off to America to 
become the star of the New World theatres, 
and Mary Anderson makes her first appear- 
ance at the Lyceum, and bewitches her 
audience with Parthenia. She is timid at first, 
and speaks in a low tone. " A little louder, 
Mary ! " a voice cries out from the back of 
the gallery ; and Mary smiles at the well- 
meant familiarity of the interruption, and she 
speaks a little louder, and she has scored a 
new success for the Lyceum. Yet a little, 
and the Lyceum welcomes with all its accla- 
mations the almost perfect Daly Company, 

H 



98 Charing Cross to St. PauTs 

with its superb actress and great artist, Miss 
Ada Rehan, and we all acknowledge with 
ready rapture that " this is the Shrew whoni 
Shakespeare drew." Yes, the Lyceum has a 
splendid record in the history of the stage. It 
has been a sort of academy of dramatic art. Its 
pupils and students go out and teach the world. 
The picture-shops and the photographers' 
used to be the delight of my early days, and 
indeed I stop every now and then even still 
to affichcr myself to some winning window. 
There is one shop — should I call it a shop ? — 
is not that word far too lowly in its import 
for the establishment I speak of? — with which 
I have certain tender associations. Some 
seventeen or eighteen years ago I was look- 
ing in at its windows one day, and a story 
about it came into my mind. I had long- 
been in the habit of studying its windows. It 
stands at the corner of one of the streets run- 
ning off the Strand — but not for worlds would 
I make known the name of the street at the 
corner of which it stands — and it exhibits rich 
store of pictures, statues, statuettes, and curi- 




BUKLEIGII STKEET, STKANU 



L.ot u 



The Strand loi 



osities — silver, gold, bronze, and all sorts of 
delightful things. I never was near the place 
but I went to the windows and studied them. 
And I got into my mind — it came on me quite 
suddenly one day — a story about it. How if 
it should happen to be owned by a man — 
I do not know to this day who owns it — who 
had two pretty daughters, and whose highest 
ambition in life was to have them, or one 
of them, married into rank '^. He had the 
repute of having plenty of money, and indeed 
lent, in a private and confidential and per- 
fectly honourable way, money on the fairest 
terms to embarrassed gentlemen who were 
known to him as clients. And everything 
goes wrong for a while, and everything comes 
right in the end — and I shall not tell my 
story all over again : this is not an advertise- 
ment. Only I am inclined to point out the 
curious relationship in which a certain house 
may stand to a writer of fiction — a house 
which, he knows not how, has inspired him 
with a subject. In that house are dwelling 
for him beings whom the owner of the house 



I02 Charing Cross to St. PaiiTs 

has never met and knows nothing of. I 
never pass that house but I see my heroine 
and her shadowy kith and kin, and her lover 
— and all the rest of them — and the owner 
of the house, I daresay, never heard of my 
heroine — and for that matter never heard of 
me — and I know nothing about him or his 
family. I only know that I have installed 
there for myself another family whose names 
do not appear upon any rate-books, and no 
member of which ever records a vote at the 
parliamentary elections for the Strand Division 
of London. There is another street running 
off the Strand in the same neighbourhood, a 
street also running to the river, in which is a 
house wherein lived one of the heroes of my 
fiction. There is a set of tiny chambers in 
Agar Street, off the Strand, about which I 
dreamed a melancholy little story. It is hard 
for a somewhat dreamy personage like myself 
to take the Strand quite seriously. One has 
made it so unreal — one has hashed up in such 
inextricable confusion the real and the unreal. 
The scent that comes from Rimmel's shop 



The Strand lo 



brings back all youth to me. Why ? Simply 
because I used to look into Rimmel's windows 
and inhale their scents when I was a very 
young man. Nothing carries with it a richer 
association than the breath of some scent. 
It is like magic. Music itself — which is 
magic — can hardly equal it. You are wander- 
ing along the streets thinking of nothing — 
along the Strand — you are moving through 
just such a crowd as our artist sets living 
before us — and you are utterly commonplace. 
And suddenly some breath of perfume is 
borne in upon you — from a flower-girl's roses, 
or even from the made-up contents of Rim- 
mel's window-cases — and behold ! one is living 
all at once in another and an enchanted world 
— the world one lived in or fancied he was 
living in years and years ago. Once, not 
long since, I was passing down the Strand, 
and there were some repairs going on — and I 
caught the odour of a pitch-kettle — and in a 
moment I was back to the seaport home of my 
boyhood again, and to the sound of the 
breaking waves. 



IV 

THE STRAND (i'Ollf iuiicd) 

TiiKKK arc a few dcliohtful old houses slill to 

o 

be seen at rare intervals on either side of the 
Strand. They are the old houses with the 
overshot windows, which suggest the days of 
Chaucer. Some of them may be seen in 
Mr. Pennell's sketch of the little crowds 
looking in at the windows in the near neigh- 
bourhood of the Strand Theatre. These 
sacred old-time houses are fast disappearing. 
Soon they will have gone altogether. Every 
lover of poetry and history and art, of what- 
ever kind, ought to be sorry when these 
houses and their memories are gone. 1 find 
no fault with the spick-and-span new red- 
brick houses, ever so much more Queen- 




Tine STKANI), liV SdMl'.USKT IIOUSK 



The Strand 107 



Anne-like than the houses of Queen Anne's 
own day. Many of these new houses are 
very beautiful buildings, and where there are 
whole streets of them the streets are, happily, 
not allowed to be monotonous. The archi- 
tects who delighted in such creations as the 
Quadrant in Regent Street are not in practice 
now. I should not feel much regret if the 
revival of Queen Anne architecture were to 
mean the pulling down and obliterating all 
remains of the hideous Georgian houses, 
with their formal, commonplace monotony. 
But one must lament for the few really old 
houses — for the fewer still that are left of the 
dear, delightful old hostelries. Is there no 
way of preserving even a few of these old 
buildings, in order that a future generation 
may be able quite to understand what 
Chaucer is talking about sometimes } Could 
they not be kept up as national monuments '^ 
I often wonder that somebody in the United 
States does not offer to buy some of them, 
and take them over — stone by stone, brick 
by brick, rafter by rafter — and set them up 



io8 Charing Cross to St. Paiirs 

again, all standing, in Central Park, New 
York, or on Boston Common. I wish some 
American would make the offer and trans- 
plant the houses. For over there they would 
be admired and preserved, but if left to us 
they are sure to vanish. You can see them 
better in Mr. Pennell's sketch than you can 
in the street. In the sketch you can study 
them at your leisure, and as long as you like ; 
in the Strand you are hustled along by the 
crowd, and you can only get a good look at 
them even for the moment by crossing to the 
other side of the street. How oddly they 
contrast with the new houses, some of which 
are their near neighbours— with the red 
bricks and the tiles, and the prison-bar-like 
windows, and the doors set deep in cells, and 
all the other old -new ornamentations of 
architecture ! What will some future genera- 
tion think of this general revival of the age 
of Queen Anne — this deliberate architectural 
masquerade and fancy-dress exposition ? 
Goethe somewhere said it was well enough 
to wear fancy dress and become a Turk or a 



The Strand 109 



Venetian senator for part of a night, but he 
could not understand being a sham Turk or 
Venetian senator for one's whole long life- 
time. Yet there are people, undoubtedly, 
who do go through their whole lives thus 
masquerading — putting on the airs of some- 
thing they are not, and never were, and 
never can be. Are we not doing something 
of the same kind with our streets and our 
houses ? But the more we carry on this 
architectural renaissance, the more fondly do 
I wish we could preserve such of our ancient 
houses as are still upreared among us. Let 
us, if possible, have some of the real old time 
to console us for the unreality of the sham 
old time. London was real once. Why 
allow every evidence of the reality to be 
effaced ^ 

Then there comes another thought. 
Queen Anne revived will, of course, only 
have her day. Even a ghost cannot live for 
ever. Men will grow tired of the red-brick 
houses and the Queen Anneism. They will 
want something else. In some far-off genera- 



no Charing Cross to St. PanTs 

tion is it not possible that a fancy might come 
up for the revival of Queen Victorianism in 
street architecture ? All very well, but what 
will there be to revive ? The aofe of Oueen 
Victoria has not any architecture of its own. 
It inherited the hideous remains of the 
Georgian times, and it came in for the 
restoration of Queen Anne. If the latter 
movement goes on much further it will soon 
have obliterated every trace of the London 
which Queen Victoria looked on when she 
went forth to her coronation, or paid her first 
visit to the House of Lords. To be sure 
there is what may perhaps be described as 
the Pimlico order of architecture — the stucco- 
faced house with its ridiculous attempt at a 
Greek porch, which house, multiplied by 
many and divided into two lines, constitutes 
a Pimlico or "South Belgravia " street. 
Nothing else in the way of street building 
ever was half so hideous. The worst of the 
Georgian streets is like Venice, or Nuremberg, 
or Oxford, by comparison. It gives one a 
sinking of the heart to look down the ruthless 




" r 



The Strand 1 1 3 

monotony of a Pimlico street, with every 
house exactly the same size and shape as 
every other, and not a tree to refresh the 
saddened, sickened eyes. But let us hope 
that revived Queen Anne may be remorseless, 
and, like the jaws of darkness, devour up 
these dreadful structures, and leave it to be 
said in history that in Queen Victoria's age 
men did not build ; they only revived. 

In the meantime we are in the Strand, 
and not in Pimlico — for which give praise. 
The sight of one of the windows in these 
Chaucerian houses revives the spirits. The 
prettiest associations curl, and twine, and play 
about it, like ivy or like smoke. One can see 
some winsome girl peep out of that window 
to look at her lover riding by, as he goes 
westward to attend the Kinf{. The Kinof, of 
course, is Edward the Third. Why should 
not the lover be Chaucer himself, in the days 
of his early courtiership, and his early court- 
ship '^ Why should not the girl looking out 
from the window be Philippa herself — the 
Philippa whom he afterwards married — in the 

I 



1 1 4 CJiaring Cross to St. PauTs 

days before he went soldiering and was taken 
captive, and got home again, and was made 
Comptroller of the Customs at the port of 
London? Yes, Philippa it is, Philippa it shall 
be, who looks down from her overshot lattice 
window and sees her courtly, gallant lover ride 
by ; and he waves his plumed cap to her, and 
makes his horse caracole just a little to show 
what he can do in the way of horsemanship, 
to make her start first and smile afterwards. 
Somerset House, as we go along, dispels the 
poetic illusions — for even Old Somerset 
House, if we could see it, would be far too 
modern for any association with Chaucerian 
times, and the Somerset House we look on 
is a thing of the day before yesterday. 

Look at the ragged woman selling, or 
trying to sell, her newspapers containing the 
" result of the Grand National." There are 
face and figure to bid the poetic begone and 
the hard, grim realistic take its place. There 
is the nineteenth -century struggle for life 
brouoht down to its meanest, its saddest. 
Mr. Pennell has done well to fix that figure 



The Strand 1 1 5 



on the mind and memory. England's 
national prestige, the glory of the empire on 
which the sun never sets — yes, it is s])lendid 
to think of that greatness and that glory — 
but just look there, look at that old woman ! 
How many hundreds of thousands of her, how 
many millions of her, I wonder, are there in 
these two islands ? Some day we shall have 
to put the big politics, the grand politics, the 
grandiose politics aside for a litde, and 
take account of her. Now let us buy her 
paper ; that is about all one can do for her. 
I do not myself know what the Grand 
National is, but let us buy a paper for the 
sake of that poor, ragged old woman, who is 
certainly national enough in her way, but 
about whom there is not much of grandeur 
anyhow. The sun which never sets on 
imperial glory has set long since on this poor 
old daughter of England. Somehow, I don't 
know how, I cannot think but that her con- 
dition dims the lustre of imperial glory. I 
always feel greatly interested in these street 
figures, as one might call them — these in- 



1 1 6 Charing Cross to Si. PauCs 

habitants of the streets, these poor things, 
young and old, who make a hving in the 
streets — to whom the pavement of the Strand 
is their Stock Exchange, their mart, their 
Royal Academy Exhibition, their court of law, 
the stage of their theatre — the flower-girls, 
the boys who scrape up refuse, the men who 
sell cheap toys, the men who have stands for 
the sale of photographs. Now the inventions 
of science promise by degrees to knock away 
all their chances of making a living, such as 
it is, out of the passing crowds on the Strand. 
We shall stand before a machine, we shall 
drop a penny and take our chance of a photo- 
graph — it may be Cardinal Manning or it may 
be Miss Nellie Farren ; or when some public 
personage is monopolising attention it may be 
that he will have a machine all to himself, and 
that we shall drop in our penny and take out 
our photograph of Mr. Stanley. All the same 
the wandering photograph-seller who lives up 
and down the Strand will find his poor little 
business taken clean out of his hands. No 
doubt we shall have some invention for the 



The Strand i 1 7 



sale of flowers in the same way, and the cheap 
toys will be sold off by process of machinery, 
and there will be a company started for the 
mechanical collection of street refuse, and 
even the sellers of the evening editions of the 
newspapers will find their occupation gone 
from them. I have often wondered, by the way, 
why London does not have any street stalls 
for the sale of newspapers and magazines and 
cheap books, as the great American cities 
have. You never need want for a newspaper 
in a great American city. You have only to 
keep on a little and you will soon come to a 
goodly stall on the side -walk, covered up 
with newspapers, and magazines, and cheap 
books — ^just, in fact, what you only see at a 
railway station here. I know what a business 
it is to get a particular newspaper if you are 
in the House of Commons and the House 
does not happen to take that particular news- 
paper in. You would have to send miles to 
the newspaper office. I have sometimes 
crossed to the Westminster Bridge railway 
station and asked for permission to go on to 



1 1 8 C/itirino Cross to St. Pau/s 

the platform and hunt up the paper there. 
But if our Parliamentary buildings were 
managed after the fashion of Washington, one 
wouKl only have to pass out into Westminster 
1 1 all to find a capacious bookstall, loaded with 
all tlie journalistic and literary delicacies 
of the season. 1 do not, somehow, see the 
great superiority of our system. Hut in truth 
we are only beginning to be a newspaper- 
reading peo[ile. We are even yet ever so far 
behind the people o{ the United States and 
the Canadians in that way. and even the 
people of New \ i^'k tlo ncn. 1 think, come 
near the people o{ tin\ little Alliens in the 
passion for the devouring of newspapers. 
Whv, the Square of the Constitution after 
the i'irf\''s have closed looks as if it were 
covered with snow, owing to the mass of 
[xi[HM-s King about that men have read and 
thrcnvn awav. 1 lu^ \ iennese, too. area news- 
paper-reading population, and so of course are 
the Parisians. Put the Parisians do not touch 
upon the New Yorkers, nor the New Yorkers 
upon the Athenians. We Londoners are 



/ehiii^ , 








ST. MAKV-I.I'-.-STUANI) 



The Strand 121 

pretty low down so far. For inventive energy 
I think, however, our newspaper-seHing boys 
and men miofht hold their own against most 
of their brothers in the trade. The New 
York newsboy is an astounding little fellow, 
with his indomitable energy, and his unweary- 
ing good spirits, and his quenchless eagerness 
for trade ; but I do not think he allows him- 
self to invent much. I remember being 
stopped once in a cab, as I was driving home 
from a theatre on the Strand, by a boy selling 
newspapers, who implored me to buy the 
latest edition, containing the full account of 
the shooting of Mr. Parnell that evening by 
Mr. Charles Bradlaugh. I did not purchase, 
and the event was not recorded in the morn- 
ing journals of the following day. 

Near the old houses in the Strand Mr. 
Pennell has given us a characteristic figure. 
It is that of a man with a great bloated face, 
and a pipe in his mouth. Probably it is only 
the human countenance that could be so 
completely divorced from all shade of expres- 
sion. No doubt the man is enjoying his 



122 Charing Cross to St. Paul's 

pipe, but his face betrays no gleam of 
deliorht which mioht c^ive us the satisfaction 
of knowing that a human creature is happy. 
He seems to be of the costermonger class, 
and the costermonger, I should fancy, con- 
trives to get a good deal of a rough 
practical sort of enjoyment out of life. But 
this man is all stolidity. He sucks his pipe 
and pushes his way, and seems to have no 
concern with emotion of any kind. This 
is a face one sees very often in London. 
One does not see it so often, or often at 
all, in the great provincial cities, such as 
Manchester, Liverpool, and Glasgow — one 
does not see it at all, I think, in Paris or 
in New York. In Paris one sees many 
faces sullen, scowlinQ-, and discontented — 
men with old and new revolutions gleaming 
in their fierce eyes. But the face of actual 
and complete stolidity is to be found in 
its best specimens in London. I wonder 
whether that man with the pipe ever thinks 
of anything ? When he goes home at night 
after his day's work does he ever review 



The Strand 12 



life at all, and take into account how much 
it is worth to him ? Or does the pipe supply 
the place of all the futile thought and hope- 
less self-scrutiny wherewith most others of 
us mortals are wont to perplex ourselves 
by way of recreation ? Would that man do 
a noble action if it came in his way to do it, 
or would he, under like conditions, commit 
a crime ? I am almost inclined to think 
that he could not do a noble action or 
commit a crime, because nothing would be 
a noble action or a crime to him. The 
thing would not present itself to him in 
that light. If he did a good deed it would 
not be because he thought it good, or 
thought about it at all ; if he committed a 
crime it would only be as the machine at 
the railway station gives out its packet of 
butterscotch or its cigarette. I do not think 
the study of that face makes one quite ex- 
ultant about the blessings of civilisation in 
London. It must be curious — if one could 
get to the inside of it — the life of a man 
who never reflects. We know what an 



I 24 Charing Cross to St. PaiiTs 

inferior and good-for-nothing creature is the 
man who never to himself has said that this, 
whatever it might be, is his own, his native 
land. But this man with the pipe probably 
never said anything to himself about his 
native land — it probably never came into his 
mind that he had a native land, and he would 
not have troubled himself to care about the 
fact even if he recognised its existence. Has 
he even a vaeue dislike somehow and some- 
where to the French or the Russians — or 
the Irish, maybe ? — I hardly think so. I can 
hardly believe he has reasoned himself far 
enough to get up any such emotion. I have 
sometimes been amused, when having to 
wander about obscure parts of London, to 
find how many people there are who do not 
know the name of the street in which they 
themselves are living. They have hired 
their poor little lodging, and perhaps have 
occupied the same lodging for a long time — 
in many trades and quarters the populations 
are not at all nomad — and they know where 
their home is, and can find it every night 




ST. MARY-LE-S-IRAND FROM THK EAST 



The Strand 127 



without a mistaken ; and what more should 
they want to know about it ? What does 
it matter to them by what name somebody 
has chosen to call the street? It is their 
street — the street in which they live — and 
that is enough and to spare for them. I 
am inclined to believe that this man with 
the pipe never asked himself or any one else 
the name of the street in which he lives. 

Near Somerset House a man is crossing 
the Strand. He wears a double eye-glass, 
through which he is peering as he crosses, 
apparently looking for some name or number 
on a shop. He has a full beard and mous- 
tache, and a handsome, well -moulded face. 
He has left middle aoe a little behind — 
he is making towards sixty — but there is a 
freshness, there is an elasticity about him 
which still carries with it a perfume and a 
savour as of youth. I think he takes life 
now pretty much as he finds it. He has 
thought out most questions as far as he 
could, and then at last come to the conclusion 
that it would be better to let them think 



128 Charing Cross to St. Paiirs 

themselves out without any trouble on his 
part. He belongs to one of the artistic 
professions, I am sure. I should be inclined 
to set him down as a genial literary or 
dramatic critic. He has written books and 
plays in his time, and they were good in 
their way, and had a certain sort of success ; 
but they were not good enough for him. 
He recognised the fact that he had not the 
sacred fire of genius in him, and he did not 
care for mere respectability in literature or 
the drama. So he gave up creative work of 
any kind, and took to journalism — to criticism, 
and what are called "society leaders," and, 
indeed, leaders on all manner of light and 
bright subjects. He is really an admirable 
critic, because he Is intensely sympathetic. 
He approaches every book or play he 
criticises with a sincere desire to find some- 
thing good in it. If he really cannot say 
anything good of it he would much rather 
say nothing at all about it. But when, as 
in the case of a play, for example, he can- 
not let it pass unnoticed, then he gives his 



The Strand 



i^i 



opinion, gently indeed, but very firmly ; and 
those who know him, and who have not seen 
the play, put the criticism down when they 
have read it with the firm conviction that 
that play will not hold the stage for long. 
Pretensions of any kind make him angry, 
and he hates to be sought out and done 
homage to by certain authors and actors who 
only court him because they want to get him 
to notice them and to praise them. He 
lives mainly in the Garrick Club, and he is a 
great favourite there, as indeed he is where- 
ever he is known. He is fond of talking 
about Thackeray, whom he knew, and it 
may be that some of the younger members 
of the Club think he talks a little too much 
about Thackeray, whom they did not know. 
There is a story about his having been much 
in love in his early — indeed, not very early — 
days with a woman who first was of opinion 
that she loved him, and then became of the 
opinion that she loved somebody else, and 
married that somebody accordingly. She 
was not happy with the somebody, and the 



Charing Cross to St. Pauls 



somebody died, after having led her a hard 
Hfe for many years. Then most people 
thought our friend the critic would marry 
her, but he did not. Perhaps he thought he 
could not trust his " fause true-love" any 
more. Perhaps he had settled down to his 
own free and comfortable bachelor life. 
Perhaps he had grown out of all poetry and 
sentiment : but that does not seem likely. 
Anyhow, there he is, going off to the Garrick 
very likely, and he will dine there, and go 
from there and look in upon a theatre or two. 
Later he will get back to the Garrick, and 
will meet Mr. Irving there, and Mr. Bancroft, 
and Mr. Beerbohm Tree, and Mr. Harry 
Furniss, and that most polished of orators 
and brightest of wits, Mr. David Plunket, and 
"Joe" Knight and Comyns Carr, and ever 
so many more delightful companions. 

I have spoken of anecdotes about 
Thackeray, and acknowledged the fact that 
younger men sometimes think the subject 
wellnigh exhausted. Still, with that know- 
ledge full in my mind, let me tell a little 



The Strand 133 



anecdote of my own about 1 liackeray and 
the Garrick Club. Many years ago 1 was 
invited to dine at the Garrick by a man well 
known about town in those days. He was a 
man of some means, and " by way of being " 
a literary man, and he had the reputation of 
being somewhat of a snob in Thackeray's 
sense of the word. That evening he began 
talking to me about Thackeray, and saying, 
as many people were fond of saying at the 
time, that Thackeray was a more complete 
snob than anybody pictured in his own book. 
I knew little of Thackeray personally, but I 
did not believe then, and I do not believe 
now, the accusation of snobbery made 
against him. So I disputed my friend's 
assertion. Whereupon he proceeded to give 
me evidence. "Why, in this very room," he 
said, " Thackeray came to me yesterday and 
offered me a cigar, and accompanied his offer 
with the words, ' Yoit ought to think highly 
of that cigar, for it was given me by a noble 
marquis.'" Yes, the story is perfectly true, 
and my friend did not see in the least that 



134 Charing Cross to St. Paul's 

Thackeray was chaffing him ; was perhaps a 
little too open in his allusion to my friend's 
supposed personal weakness — his too tender 
devotion to the aristocracy of Great Britain. 
My friend never knew, I venture to think, 
why I smiled so much at his interesting 
anecdote. There, I have told my Thackeray 
story, and do not intend to tell any other. 
"We don't talk of Nathaniel Hawthorne any 
more," a literary man said to me not very 
long ago in Boston. New men come up and 
must have their turn. *' Marry and amen," 
as Browning would say. By the way, the 
motto of some popular edition of Browning- 
might well be found in the passage to which 
these words belong. They are, if I remem- 
ber rightly, in the prelude to The Ring and 
the Book. The poet has addressed the 
British public, "Ye who love me not," and 
then a little later on come the words, " Oh, 
British public, who may love me yet — marry 
and amen ! " The time has arrived ; the 
British public does love him at last. 

In my early London days there used to 




ST. CLliMKNT DANES 



The Strand 137 



be talk of a haunted house in — where does 
the reader think ?— why, in Norfolk Street, 
Strand. What an idea ! A ghost in that 
prosaic region of the absolutely common- 
place ! Yes, the ghost was talked about, 
and it was said to be attached to a lodging- 
house, which was falling into decay accord- 
ingly. There was no Psychical Society in 
those days, and no scientific and organised 
attempt was made to find out all about th^ 
ghost, though I think some amateur efforts 
were made in that direction with the con- 
sent of the proprietor of the establishment. 
Nothing appears to have come of them, and 
the story died away. May it not have been, 
however, that if there ever was a ghost in 
the house it was a ghost personally con- 
ducted thither by one of the lodgers ? Men 
of decayed family, when summoned to town 
on business, often put up in one of those 
Norfolk Street lodging-houses. As every- 
body knows, there are family ghosts attached 
to certain ancient houses, particularly Scottish 
and Irish houses — ghosts of a nature like 



138 Charing Cross to St. PaiiVs 

that of the dog who goes about with his 
master, as well as ghosts of the nature of the 
cat who abides by the family hearth. Why 
may not some ghost of the former order 
have come up to London with the head of 
the family and stayed in Norfolk Street, and 
wandering inconsiderately about the passages 
at midnight have scared some belated lodger, 
and so set wild rumour afloat ? Then, of 
course, when the head of the family called 
for his bill, and had his trunks packed and 
went away home, the attendant spectre would 
go away home with him, I wonder what 
would happen if two travellers brought two 
ghosts with them ? Or suppose into some 
house already haunted by its own ghost there 
were to come a visitor with his family appa- 
rition in his train ? Would there be a fight, 
as Artemus Ward puts it in reference to his 
probable meeting in the happy hunting- 
grounds above with the red-skinned brother 
who had robbed him down here on earth ? 
Do ghosts speak to each other when they 
meet ? Do they feel in this strange material 



The Strand 139 



world as two Englishmen might do who met 
in China, and assume that no ceremony of 
introduction is needed between two kinsmen 
of race meeting in such an out-of-the-way 
and foreign region ? 

We are getting to the region of the Law 
Courts. Positively I have to stop and pull 
myself up, and think what that part of the 
Strand was like before the Law Courts were 
begun. Temple Bar, of course, one re- 
collects ; and there was a queer little shop 
kept by a barber and hairdresser, and there 
was a passage, a sort of cul-de-sac, opening 
out of the Strand somewhere about the spot 
where the principal entrance to the Law 
Courts is erected — and I think it was called 
Pickett's Place — and I remember a sad story 
connected with it. Sad ; yes, to be sure, 
but very commonplace in its catastrophe, 
although not perhaps in all its progress. It 
is only the story of a young man in some- 
what delicate health who came up to push 
his way into London literature. He had 
great gifts and he had a good start. He 



140 Charing Cross to St. Paurs 

besfan to write for some of the best of the 
magazines and for a daily newspaper. But 
he turned one day into this dull little 
Pickett's Place, and there he found his 
fatality. Fate came to him in the shape of 
a pretty, coquettish woman who kept a cigar 
shop. He fell in love with her. She was 
a married woman, but her husband had left 
her. My young literary friend fell madly in 
love with her. It was more like a case of 
sheer insanity than any other love-madness 
I have ever known. I have sometimes 
thought of describing it in a novel, but it 
would not do. Nobody would believe it. 
That is the worst about the events of real 
life : you cannot always venture to make use 
of them in fiction, for the reader will say 
they are too improbable to be even interest- 
ing. It was not merely that my friend gave 
up his whole heart to her — that anybody 
might have done for a woman — but he gave 
up his whole time to her. He spent his 
every day in the little shop in Pickett's Place. 
He dropped his club, he was never seen at 



The Strand 141 



his once familiar haunts. He took her out 
to dinner at some quiet tavern every evening. 
The whole clay long he sat in that shop 
talking to her. He neglected his work, gave 
up his engagement on the daily paper ; did 
nothing but hang after the skirts of this 
pretty, saucy young woman. I often used to 
wonder how he did not feel ashamed of beinf>- 
seen all day long in that cigar shop by every 
one who chose to go in. His friends soon 
came to know that if they wanted to see him 
they must go to the shop in Pickett's Place. 
He ceased to write to his people at home ; 
when they wanted to know anything about 
him they wrote to me, and I softened things 
as well as I could. At last I recommended 
that the young man's mother should come to 
town and talk to him. She did come, and 
they had some sad scenes. Nothing could be 
done. He told his mother that he could not 
live without this woman's love, and that he 
meant to hold on to her in the hope that her 
husband might drink himself to death, and in 
that event he was determined to marry her. 



142 Charing Cross to St. Pmil's 

He told his mother that there was nothing 
wrong between them, which I firmly believe, 
for the little cigar-woman was determined to 
marry him, and I felt no doubt that she 
would maintain a rigid propriety in their 
relationship. I went to her once as a private 
ambassador from the family, to ask her 
whether she was not prepared to take what 
Mr. Labouchere once called "a financial view 
of the matter." She laughed at the proposi- 
tion. She was not prepared to take a financial 
view — that financial view — of the matter. 
She was determined to marry the young man, 
and then everything would be hers, she said. 
So I dropped out of the business, and only 
saw my infatuated friend from time to time. 
He gave up his whole life to this woman — 
his life, his family, his prospects, his literary 
career, his intellect, his education, his mind, 
his heart, his better nature, his very soul, to 
this brainless and unfeeling little creature. 
At last the husband did "dree his weird," 
did drink himself to death, and my Antony 
was married to his Pickett's Place Cleopatra. 



The Strand 143 



Then the wife's one grand calculation proved 
a complete miscalculation. She had relied 
on the love of the father and mother for their 
son, and she felt sure that when once the 
thing was done they would take him back, 
and take her with him. They did nothing 
of the kind ; they could not be induced to 
take him back. They forgave him, they 
said ; but that was all, and one cannot live 
on forgiveness. They did not withdraw the 
little allowance they used to make him, but 
it was only a very little allowance. It would 
have kept a young bachelor well enough in 
London while he was making a career for 
himself ; but it was nothing for a man with a 
wife who, in the very cigar shop itself, had 
acquired expensive tastes, and could under- 
stand no affection which did not frequently 
express itself in champagne. So they 
dragged on together, he still loving her in a 
sickly maniacal sort of way. She got cham- 
pagne — sometimes from him when he had 
the money, sometimes from others. But she 
got the champagne, and she began to wear 



144 Charing Cross to St. Paurs 

costly ornaments. Then lie grew jealous, 
and she told him that she didn't care. A 
man had no right to marry, she told him 
bluntly, unless he had the means of keeping 
a wife according to her tastes. His people 
had deceived her, she said — they had taken 
her in ; she never would have married hini if 
she had known what horrid and hard-hearted 
people they were. But she meant to amuse 
herself in life, she declared ; she had had 
enough of sentimentality. 

"Did you never love me.'*" he asked, 
piteously. " Oh, love ! — botheration ! " was 
her encouraging repl)% and then, further to 
relieve her feelings, she mentioned that she 
thought she was marrying a gentleman, and 
found she had married only a consumptive 
pauper. Even then he had not the courage 
to do anything ; he told himself that he could 
not live without her. Very likely he could 
not. But he soon found that he certainly 
could not live with her. She deceived him 
for a time, then frankly ceased to deceive 
him, for she took no trouble to conceal any- 



The Strand 145 



thing from him. He died of consumption 
not long after, poor fellow ! and his true 
friends were all glad that he had been set 
free. I had written a strong appeal to his 
father and mother, and with the dread of his 
death their anger melted away, and the 
mother wrote to say that they were both 
coming up to town to be near him. The 
letter came when I was standing beside his 
dead body in the presence of his wife. She 
took the letter and opened it. Her words 
summed up the situation. "Oh, bother!" 
she exclaimed; "what's the good of that 
now } ' ' 

Here was a little Marble Heart tragedy 
in Pickett's Place, off the Strand. I do not 
know what became of the Marble Heart. I 
never heard anything of the woman since. 
I never knew, in all my acquaintanceships, 
any instance of a promising, manly, generous 
life being so utterly and completely spoiled 
by an ignorant, selfish, and stupid little 
woman. Apart from all considerations of 
public improvement, I am glad that Pickett's 

L 



1 46 Charmg Cross to St. Paul's 

Place has gone. I am glad that it has gone, 
merely because I associated it always with 
her and with my unhapj)y friend, I am glad 
that it is gone, and the traffic of the Law 
Courts tramps every day over its all-but- 
forgotten grave. 



V 

THE LAW COURTS 

Wk arc in the region of the Law Courts. 
The Law Courts have created here a region 
of their own — all their own. It is as when 
an army suddenly encamps in the close 
neighbourhood of some decaying old town — 
a new population, a new trafhc, a new life 
quickly spring up about it like new vegeta- 
tion. Mr. Pennell has made this very real 
for us in his sketches. He brings out with 
some vivid touches the character and colour 
of that new life which the Law Courts have 
created. We are standing in front of the 
entrances to the courts. Looking eastward 
we can see the matchless proportions of the 
mystical Griffin, and farther on the tower 



148 Charing Cross to St. Paufs 

of St. Dunstan's. The tracery of the tower 
comes exquisitely out, and if one fixes his 
eyes on it and disdains for a moment the 
lower level of life, he might fancy himself 
back in some mediaeval Nuremberg. People 
in general do not know how London can be 
glorified, etherealised, mysticised, utterly trans- 
i'lgured by looking from beneath up to its roofs 
and chimneys and gables. As we look at the 
tower of St. Dunstan's now we are easily 
lifted from the real into the ideal, St. 
Dunstan has long since lost his giants — so 
long since that many of the present genera- 
tion of Londoners do not even know that 
St. Dunstan ever had giants to lose. " Be- 
fore St. Mark still glow his steeds of brass," 
but before St. Dunstan no longer stand his 
Gog and Magog. 

Come down, however, from St. Dunstan's 
and the clouds. Return to the Law Courts. 
" I mind the bigging o't," as poor Edie 
Ochiltree says in 77ic Antiquary. I used 
to go to a newspaper office in the City a 
good deal about the time when the Courts 



The Law Courts 149 

were bciiiL^ built, and I look an interest in 
their progress, partly because of the long- 
controversies in the House of Commons 
which liad precluded the scheme for their 
erection — controversies as to site and 
structure and wliat not, which divided Par- 
liament into hostile camps on the building 
question, as it had been divided years before 
on what T may perhaps call the constitution 
of South I\ensin!4ton. 'i'he building of the* 
Law Courts was destined to be the occasion 
of a different kind of controversy also, for 
there was a dispute with the workmen, and 
there was a strike, and tluM'(^ was the im|)orta- 
tion of forcMgn workmcMi to finish the build- 
ings, and at on(! time the; prophets of evil 
shook their heads and said the scheme; had 
been unlucky from first to last, and the build- 
ings would never be fmished at all. The; 
controversy, however, got settled somehow 
— that conlrov(;rsy ; the Law Courts were 
built and ()j)ened. I rememlx'r the day well. 
The Queen in person presided ovc;r the 
ceremonial in the lon^' narrow central hall. 



150 Charing Cross to St. Paiil s 

It really was a magnificent pageant. I am 
not very fond of public ceremonials as a rule, 
but this was a noble sight. The order of 
the day was for men to wear either uniforms 
or Court dresses, except as regarded the Bar, 
of which the members wore the garb of their 
profession and its rank. No one was allowed 
to enter in ordinary morning dress — the 
few men who were not barristers and were 
not entitled to wear Court dress had to come 
in evening costume. Of course all the ladies 
were in full evening dress. I wonder if I 
may digress for a moment to mention a 
definition of the right to wear Court dress 
which was laid down for me once by lips that 
seemed to breathe forth authority ? It was 
at a great dinner in the City — a feast given in 
honour of an eminent statesman and diplo- 
matist. The cards of invitation prescribed 
that the guests were to come in uniform 
or Court dress. Nevertheless, there were 
several at the tables in ordinary evening 
garb. I got into talk with my next neigh- 
bour, who was evidently a civic dignitary 




A 






Ch 



Till'-. CORNI-.U OF KSSF.X STRKKT 



The Law Couids 153 

of high rank, and we spoke on the subject 
of Court costume. I asked him how it 
happened that some gentlemen were allowed 
to come in ordinary evening dress. The 
truth is, I was smarting under a sense of 
wrong, for I had put myself into an anti- 
quated Court suit which I had worn at a 
Speaker's dinner more than ten years before, 
and I had thus clad myself because I was 
under the impression that I should not be 
allowed in if I came in ordinary evening 
wear. My instructor said there had to be 
allowance made for gentlemen who, whatever 
their personal merits, were not entitled to 
put on Court dress. This opened a new field 
of inquiry to me, on which my friend was 
very willing to give me information. He 
explained to me all the various positions, dig- 
nities, offices, functions, acts and deeds, and 
so on, which entitled a man to put on Court 
costume. But I urged that surely a man 
who had not held any of these offices, or 
done any of these things, or gone through 
any of these presentation ceremonials, might 



154 Charing Cross lo St. Paurs 

nevertheless put on Court dress if he Hked. 
My instructor settled the question at once, 
with dignity and even severity. " He might, 
sir," he said, "but it would be for hini only 
fancy dress ! " I questioned no more that 
day. 

It was really a great ceremonial. One 
odd little incident of it made a fantastic 
impression on me. It was in the earliest 
days of December 1882. The late Arch- 
bishop of Canterbury had just died — was not 
yet buried. The ordinary spectators were 
arrayed along either side of the great hall, 
and there was kept open a wide space in the 
middle — a path by which the Queen and the 
Royal princes and princesses, and the great 
dignitaries of Church and State, were to pass 
to the places reserved for them. Suddenly 
there was borne along what seemed to be a 
sort of bier with a recumbent and deathlike 
figure in it. A shudder passed through some 
of those who stood near me, and some one in 
aloud whisper hazarded the explanation that, 
for some ancient reason or usage, it was held 



'Jlic La7c> Courls 155 

IxxomiiiL^ that on such an occasion the last 
Archbishop of Canterbury, as well as his 
living successor, should be present. This, 
however, was not the true explanation. The 
true explanation was simple. Oiu; of the 
oldest of the judges was in such a condition 
of h(;alth that he could neither walk nor 
stand. Ih; was unwilling, however, to 
remain away from the ctiremoiiial, and h(^ 
had himself thus borne into th(; hall. I I is 
palliil lace and closed eyes, as he; was carried 
past, gave some ground for the startling 
theory that we were looking on the bi(M- of 
the dead Archbishop. 

When the pageantry was over, and the 
Royal visitors had gone, the doors of th(; hall 
were thrown o[)en for tlu; gcMieral public, and 
the gcMieral pui)lic came in with a very ugly 
rush indexed. I have; seen sonie crowding in 
my time, but 1 have seldom seen anything 
more formidable for the moment than that 
sudden meeting between the vast throng- 
struggling to get in, and those who were; still 
left in the hall struoolino- to oet out. I was 



156 Charing Cross to St. PauFs 

one of those who had remained in the hall, 
not knowinof that the doors were to be thus 
suddenly thrown open ; and I found myself, 
with my daughter, all at once in the thick of 
that terrible crowd. We were swept some- 
how out of the hall and on to the pavement. 
A few mounted police were striving to keep 
back some of the crowd, but the rush was 
too impetuous, and the force behind the 
nearest wave too great, to allow of any 
effectual restraint. I feared for a moment 
that the ill-luck of the Law Courts was about 
to be proved in a very ghastly way, and that 
lives would be lost in that terrible struggle. 
One poor girl — a nicely -dressed creature 
apparently of the sempstress class — fell down 
in a faint not far from where I was battling 
my way, and some men and women tumbled 
right over her ; but they were up again in a 
moment, and they were trying to lift her — 
the very worst thing they could have done 
for her — when some police forced their way 
in and cleared a little space round the girl, 
and a kindly woman composed her arms and 



The Lazu Courts 1 5 7 

legs, and after a little she sighed and shivered 
and cried, and then came to all right again. 
Poor girl ! the woman who attended her 
opened her firmly -clasped hand and found 
in it two sixpences — her little stock of 
funds, no doubt, for the day's holiday, and 
which even in her swoon she clutched firmly. 
After all there was no particular harm done 
to anybody so far as I could make out, but 
the danger for the moment was very genuine, 
and the horror of the situation remains clear 
in my memory. Nothing seems to me more 
pathetic and pitiful in its way than the 
half-crazy eagerness of the poorer class of 
Londoners to see any manner of sight. 
They will fight, struggle, rush, risk their lives, 
to see anything. Mothers will carry their 
little babies into the thick of the roughest 
crowd on the chance of having a glimpse 
at anything out of the common. Men and 
women will wait for hours in cold and rain 
to see a carriage drive by with some Royal 
personage in it. They will tramp for miles 
beside a handful of soldiers marching. The 



158 CJiaring Cross to St. PaiiFs 

utter bareness and barrenness of their 
ordinary lives makes any novelty welcome to 
them. What did these men and women 
expect to see in the Law Courts that day ? 
All the Royal visitors had been carefully got 
out of the way before the doors were thrown 
open. Nothing was to be seen but a long, 
narrow hall. Such a crowd would not care 
much about the hall's architectural merits. 
The hall could be seen the very next day by 
anybody. But there was the temptation — 
something, anything, to be seen at once — at 
once ; and so they risked their limbs and their 
lives in the one mad overpowering desire to 
have a sight of it. 

Two of the bravest and the coolest men I 
know or have ever known have alike told 
me that the one thing they most dread is the 
rush of a great crowd. Even a friendly 
crowd, I was told by each man, had a terror 
for him. I know a very plucky girl — and 
there are many girls a great deal pluckier 
than most men — who told me she never 
knew what fear was until she got involved in 



The Laiu Courts 159 

a great crowd at an election. It was a 
friendly crowd and a good-humoured crowd 
— would not willingly have hurt a hair of her 
head — but it was a crowd, and she was 
helpless to get out of it, and it was helpless 
to let her out, and she was painfully 
squeezed, and she saw nothing but the dense 
mass of coats and shawls and faces, and she 
felt as if she must faint, and asked herself 
what would happen to her if she fainted, and 
the crowd was eagerly rushing on and she 
was swept along with it ; "and if I faint and 
fall," she thought, "they must rush over me 
and must trample me to death." I have 
seen her on the deck of a Levantine 
steamer in a white squall off Cape Matapan, 
and she showed no more fear than if she 
were at home in her drawing-room ; but the 
election crowd was too much for her nerves, 
and she gave way to an utter terror. 

I must say that I think a London crowd 
is almost always a good-natured crowd. 
Lately I passed through a London crowd 
which all the time I saw it was on a broad 



i6o C/iariiiLi' Cross lo St. PauPs 

grin. There was a great function going on 
in the City, and a procession of carriages 
was driving along the Strand and Fleet 
Street. At either side and all alon^ the 
route a dense wall of men and women, girls 
and boys, was set up. Every face was en- 
livened by the same broad grin. What was 
the source of the mirth } I could not guess 
— I have not the least idea. What did they 
see ? Merely a string of carriages, with men 
and women in evening dress seated therein. 
No doubt some of us were ridiculous objects 
enough — that I readily admit. But we can- 
not all have been ridiculous. That pretty 
girl, now, so becomingly dressed, with the 
tall, handsome, soldierly -looking man, her 
father doubtless — what is there to laugh at 
in her, or In him, or in both together.'* Yet 
the grin was as broad while they were pass- 
ing by as if they had been a pair of figures 
out of a Punch and Judy show. The mirth 
was not that of derision ; it had nothing 
savage, nothing bitterly scornful about it. 
It was simply the expression of honest, 














M 



The Low Courts i6 



J 



irrepressible amusement. For some reason 
or other we were all of us too much for that 
crowd — we were simply too ridiculous, and 
the crowd could not help itself — it must 
needs grin. It was trying, I confess, to he 
thus regarded as the laughing-stock of a 
good-natured crowd, which evidently did not 
want to offend or annoy us, but could not 
possiljly keep from laughing at us. It was 
trying to have to pass slowly along through 
a mile or so of a throng every face in which 
was distended by this one unceasing and 
unchanging smile at us. Let us hope the 
ordeal may have done some of us good — 
may have helped to take the conceit out 
(^f us. It is not thus we are usually fond 
enough to regard ourselves — not as mere 
objects of the laughter of a crowd of our 
fellow -mortals. There can hardly be the 
self-conceit in man or woman which would 
not have some of the starch taken out of it 
by that promenade between those two lines 
of grinning faces. Mr. Pennell has drawn a 
flower-girl in one of these sketches. She is 



164 Charing Cross to St. Pauis 

to be seen near the entrance to the Law 
Courts. She is a sonsie girl, with a broad 
mouth and a great smile : " Does she call all 
that a smile?" — I think 1 am quoting the 
words of some popular burlesque. It is a 
big smile, certainly, and 1 am sure that smile 
must have smiled at me, not on me. the day 
I had to face that singular ordeal. Well, 
she is a pleasant-looking girl, and I owe her 
no ill-will, even though she did honestly 
think me and my companions ridiculous 
creatures, and did frankly acknowledge the 
conviction by the distortion of her expressive 
countenance. 

Observe the different types (^S. lawyer 
which ]\Ir. Pennell is able to show us. See 
that lawyer with the clean-shaven face ; see 
that other with the moustache and beard 
and eye-glass. These are two contrasting 
types. The clean-shaven lawyer has his 
very soul in his profession. He has not a 
thought beyond it — he would not allow 
himself to have a thought beyond it, even 
if he could. He never reads anything but 



The Law Coitris 165 

briefs and law rc[)orts. II(; never talks of 
anythiiiL^ but cases and venliits and judij"- 
ments. Ih; lias nev^er l)een known to lan^h 
at anytliini;' but one of his own jokes of 
course in court or any joke delivtM'cd 
by a judi^c I'dia says of himself that if 
the sun were some day to take to risino- in 
the west and pursuing' a stc*ady course (east- 
ward, he, i'dia, would never notice anything' 
unusual in the revcM'sed [)rogress. Neither 
would our close-sha\'en lawyer, unl(;ss sonn; 
one wert; to invite his att(;ntion to the pheno- 
menon, and even then he would not trouble 
his mind Ioul;' about it. Why should he ? 
It would have no particular bearini;' on the 
case of l)()x versus Cox or Pattcu" i>ci'siis 
Clatter. How hard he works, our clean- 
shaven lawyer! lie has a pull at his briefs 
late at nioht— last thing at night — -and he 
is up early in the morning, and the moment 
he is cleanly shaven he goes at them again. 
I have seen him in a drawing-room after a 
dinner-party cre(;p to a sofa and s(;ttle down 
there, and rest his head on the arm of the 



1 66 Charing Cross to St. Paufs 

sofa and have a quiet little sleep — all from 
sheer physical exhaustion. Then in a few 
niinutes he is awake and alert again. Now 
look at our other friend, the lawyer with the 
moustache and the beard and the eye-glass. 
He is an able man in his professional way 
too, but he does not surrender life absolutely 
to law and the Law Courts. Not he, indeed. 
Why, you can see by the first glance at him 
that he is a leading man in his Volunteer 
corps, that he is fond of ritle-shooting, that 
he likes to knock about the billiard-balls. 
Vou can sec hini on his horse in the Row 
every morning, and you may come upon 
him on a Sunday evening at Hurlingham, 
and there is seldom a first night of any 
importance in a London West- End theatre 
when he is not to be seen in one of the 
stalls. He enjoys life — he enjoys even his 
law cases ; he is in good spirits about them ; 
he takes them as a game, as an amusement, 
rather than as a duty and a business. But 
he never talks about them at a dinner-party 
— he will talk of anything else rather. Will 



The Law Courts 167 

he get on in his profession ? Oh yes, he is 
getting on in his profession. There is no 
reason why he should not run his clean- 
shaven rival hard in the race. There are 
different ways of doing the same sort of 
work — of reaching the same end, that is 
all. Prince Hal takes to the battle in one 
spirit, Harry Hotspur in another. By the 
way, in Shakespeare's rendering it is Prince 
Hal who carries the day. 

I admire the exterior of the Law Courts. 
I am told I ought not to do so, and that it 
is not the right thing to admire any part 
of the structure, outside or inside. But I 
cannot help myself — I cannot get over my 
invincible ignorance, and I stop every now 
and then in front of the Courts and look 
on them with admiration. I also admire 
the long, narrow hall. But my admiration 
comes to a stop there. Anything meaner, 
more uncomfortable, more ugly than the 
various little courts themselves, was never 
[)ut togethcir by the perverted ingenuity of 
man. It would be hard to exaecferate the 



1 68 C/iarino; Cross to St. Paii/'s 

utterly paradoxical character of these re- 
markable courts. They are too small ; they 
are too large ; they are too dark ; they are 
too glaring- ; they are too hot ; they are too 
cold ; it is impossible to hear what a witness 
is saying, and yet each court is like a 
whispering gallery to send along the 
muttered gossip of some idle spectator. 
The draughts that howl through these 
rooms make one fancy he is in the Cave 
of yEolus. The orcat curtains which are 
huncT at the doors are so arranoed that thev 
involve the hapless stranger trying to enter 
as if he were beintr rolled in a huQe blanket. 
If you are seated securely in the court it is 
interesting to watch the struggles of this 
hapless stranger. You see his form bulging 
here and there through the thick drapery 
in which he has ignorantly invested himself 
He thought he had nothing to do but to 
draw the curtain aside and go in : he did 
draw the curtain aside, but it took him into 
its folds and rolled itself round and round 
him, and look how he is struoohno- rioht- 



The Law Courts 169 

fully to bo free! He pluno-es this way, 
and tlu! curtain [)lung(j.s with him ; that 
way, and the curtain takes a new twist 
about him. At last h(; emeri^es, wrathful, 
shameful, his face r(;d and olowinm', and his 
hat — his |)0()r hat, which he has had to carry 
in his hand through the thick of the fight ! 
He knows that his face is dirty as well as 
red, for the curtain has clung to his bc;- 
wildered countenance, and he is not without 
a fear that my Lord on the bench may have 
seen him, and may have thought he was 
doing it all for the fun of the thing, and 
perhaps may commit him for contempt of 
court. Contempt of court indeed ! Who 
is there that could avoid feeling a contempt 
for that court ? I speak, needless to say, 
of the chamber, not of the judges who are 
compelled to sit in it or the majesty of the; 
law which they represent. I have heard 
judges themselves express over and over 
again their utter contempt for that court, 
even while they were sitting in it and 
administering justice. Indeed, the ex- 



I JO Charing Cross to St. Pau/'s 

pression of their contempt was in itself an 
administration of justice. 

I made an interesting acquaintance once 
in the precincts of these Law Courts. I 
made the acquaintance of a young barmaid. 
"Ye smile; I see ye, ye profane ones," as 
Byron says. She was occupied at one of 
the refreshment stalls near to a court which 
I used to have to attend. She was once 
a little distressed at the attentions of two 
young men somewhat of the 'Any class. 
There was no one else there except myself, 
and she gave a pleading side-glance at me 
which told me beyond mistake or doubt 
that she wished me, and my graver and 
elder presence, to remain there until the 
'Arries had taken their drink and Qone 
their way. They did not mean to be 
rude, and they were not really rude in any 
offensive way, but they were chaffing each 
other about sweethearts, and then they 
began to ask her about her sweethearts, 
and she did not like it. They went away 
soon, and then she talked to me in the 








KNTKANCK TO THE COURTS 



The Law Courts 173 

frankest and most pleasant way. She was 
well-mannered and modest, and her talk 
was interesting. She told me she hardly 
ever met with any rudeness of any kind, but 
that she did not like being chaffed, and 
she was a little afraid of the two 'Arries. 
She did not know much about the business 
of the courts. She asked me if I was con- 
cerned in a case, and I said I was ; and 
she asked me if it was something- about 
property, and I said no — that it was not a 
civil matter at all — that it was a trial in a 
criminal court. She asked me if I was 
prosecuting some one, and I said no -some 
one was prosecuting me, which was per- 
fectly true, for I was " had u[) " as a criminal 
conspirator. She was greatly puzzled, and 
evidently did not know how to reconcile 
my position with the favourable opinion 
she had allowed herself to form of me. 1 
could see, however, that she was too 
good-hearted to permit any serious suspicion 
to invade her, and that she took it for 
granted there must be some reputable 



1 74 Charing Cross to St. Paufs 

explanation. I did not see her again for 
months. My next appearance in court 
was, as Mr. Micawber puts it, " in the 
capacity of defendant in Civil process." I 
went to the refreshment stall again and 
saw my friend. She was pleased to see 
me, and asked how I had got on in my 
former case, and I told her I had got off, 
which again a little puzzled her, and that 
this time I was only mixed up in a civil 
case. She wished me luck in that too, 
and I thanked her and felt thankful. She 
asked me if I had just come to town, and 
whether the weather was fine in my part 
of the country. She was naturally under 
the impression that I only came up to town 
every now and then to bear a part in some 
law case. We had some pleasant talk 
together, and I left her with a kindly feel- 
ing, regarding her as a friendly, fresh, 
intelligent, and lady -like girl. She has for 
me another interest, too, in the fact that 
she is the only barmaid with whom, so far 
as I can remember, I ever exchanged a 



The Laiv CoiLvts 175 

single word that did not belong strictly to 
the business of my demand and her supply. 
I do not believe that I ever before got 
even so far into conversation with a young 
lady at a refreshment counter as to hazard 
a remark on the fairness or the foulness of 
the weather. 

In front of the Griffin the traffic gets all 
crowded together. A policeman stands 
dignified and motionless in the midst of it-^ 
a grand sight. Nothing disturbs him. The 
waves seem to beat on him in vain. He 
stands like the Eddystone Lighthouse in a 
storm. He seems, however, to be, unlike 
the Eddystone, somewhat conscious of the 
dignity of his position and his demeanour. 
How, indeed, could he possibly be uncon- 
scious of the one and the other } He can 
stop all that movement of traffic with a wave 
of his majestic hand. He could say to that 
stream of omnibuses, "Thus far, and no 
farther — for the moment — until I bid you go 
forward again." He can give pause to that 
swift-darting hansom, whose occupant, cran- 



I ;o C/tan'/to Cross /{) S/. Pir///'s 

ino- over the doors with eap^er, impatient gaze, 
is cvidcnllv bent on irvinii to catch some 
train. Init. no — whether he catch the train 
or miss it. there must his cab stand motion- 
less until the steadfast policeman sets it free 
to go its way. Even that stately carriage, 
with the splendid footmen and the two 
elegantly -dressed ladies who recline on its 
cushions — even that must stand when he 
conimands. lie is nor without respect and 
even reverence, in a wav. for carriages and 
their owners, but when duty has to be done 
he can be as severe with a coroneted 
barouche as with a donkey-cart. 1 always 
think that the tratlic-directing policeman in 
the middle oi the roadway has one distinct 
advantage over the policeman promenading 
along the footpath in the fact that he is not 
asked many questions. One could not stop 
in the midway of that torrent of traffic to ask 
the policeman anything. But the officer on 
the sidewalk, how he is beset with questions ! 
You see him in Mr. Pennell's sketches just 
as vou niay see him everv dav in real life, 











>. r 



.t:<v, 



.-if'' 




\\^' 



N 



The Law Courts 179 

with his head bent down to catch the purport 
of some Httle woman's interrogatory. It 
must be trying to be stopped in the middle 
of Fleet Street and invited to point out the 
shortest way to Shepherd's Hush, or Long- 
ridge Road, South Kensington, or how to 
get to the School of Cookery. But I never 
saw a policeman look impatient or heard of 
his giving other than a civil answer, llis 
resources of memory and self-possession 
never fail him. When anybody stops me in 
the street and suddenly asks me the way to 
any place, I instantly lose my head and for- 
get where the place is, or how to get to it, 
even though it should happen to be in some 
spot quite close to my own abode. 

Let us go back into the Law Courts and 
enter any one of them. It is marvellous the 
manner in which, by mere listening, one can 
bring himself to take an interest in anything. 
Here is a claim for damages being heard. 
A man has been knocked down by an 
omnibus — he was not very severely hurt, 
and there is nothing at all of the tragical 



i8o CJiaring Cross to St, PauFs 

about his story. But he was put out of 
work for a time and had to pay a doctor, and 
so he makes his claim ; and the omnibus 
company chspute it, and insist that it was all 
his own fault and his own carelessness, and 
the learned counsel on both sides fight the 
quarrel out. You listen and you become 
strangely interested. Gradually you grow 
to be quite a partisan — of the omnibus, or 
the man, as the case may be. You think 
the little jokes of the counsel are quite 
refreshing, and as for the judge, when he 
condescends to be merry with one of the 
witnesses, you find yourself breaking into a 
peal of laughter. Next day you look out in 
the papers for a report of the case, and are 
very much disappointed when you find it 
compressed into about six lines, which six 
lines are published, it would seem, mainly 
for the purpose of giving the names of the 
learned counsel. Then one begins to under- 
stand why it is that courts of law have their 
reo'ular attendants, who resort there not 
because of some particular case in which 



The Lazv Courts i8i 

they feel an interest, but simply because the 
courts are open and something is going on. 
I have noticed that some people come 
regularly to the same court day after day, 
bringing a packet of sandwiches with them, 
which they consume at the regular luncheon- 
time, remaining in the court while all others 
have gone out, and while I am eating some- 
thing at the refreshment-bar and talking to 
my one and only friend there. How do 
they live, these people who come day after 
day to the courts } They cannot all be 
persons of property — none of them look 
quite like that — and how and when do they 
work for their living ? What can the 
occupations be which allow men to devote 
the greater part of the day to the unprofitable 
pastime of attending the sittings of a law 
court .'* They cannot all be printers on the 
staff of a morning paper ; they do not look 
like actors ; they cannot all belong to my line 
of life and do literary work at night ; and 
there they are day after day, day after day ! 
They are of kin, apparently, with the poorly- 



1 82 Charing Cross to St. Pauls 



dressed men who sit in St. James's Park for 
hours daily. I suppose the men and women 
who attend the courts get to feel as if they 
were acquaintances of the officials, and of the 
counsel, and even of the judges. They do, 
I know, sometimes pick up an acquaintance 
which may ripen into something like friend- 
ship with certain of the policemen and the 
ushers. One can fancy some such regular 
visitor at the courts sitting in St. James's 
Park one day during the long vacation with 
his little boy or girl, and seeing a dignified- 
looking person pass by who graciously 
salutes him with a nod of the head. " Who 
is that gentleman, papa? " "That gentle- 
man, my dear, is Mr. Wafer, usher in the 
Lord Chief Justice's court ; he is a very 
particular friend of mine." How proud that 
child feels of that parent ! How proud that 
parent feels of himself! It would be worth 
sitting in court for months of the dullest 
cases to win at the end the triumph of such 
a moment ! We can all bring it home to 
ourselves easily enough. You are walking 



The Laiu Courts 183 

in Hyde Park on a Sunday with your ad- 
miring niece from the country. Some one 
salutes you graciously. " Uncle, who is that 
gentleman ? " " That, my dear, is the Lord 
Chief Justice " — or Lord Wolseley, as the 
case may be. Then we do, indeed, feel that 
life is worth living, and that we in particular 
have not lived in vain. The one touch of 
nature makes the whole world kin. 



VI 

FLEET STREET 

From the new realms of the Law Courts we 
get into the ancient region of the newspapers. 
It is ancient, of course, only in a sense. It 
was not particularly noted as a newspaper 
region about the time when Dr. Johnson 
invited Boswell to take that famous walk 
down Fleet Street. But it seems ancient to 
us now, and Fleet Street is as much the 
accepted and typical region of the newspaper 
and the newspaper man as the Latin Quarter 
was once, and even to some extent still is. 
the recoijnised home of the Bohemian 
student. INIr. Pennell gives us some well- 
chosen glimpses of this region. Look at 
the two opposite corners oi' that little lane 




1'-li;et stkeet 



Fleet Street 187 



which opens out from Fleet Street : one 
corner occupied by the Punch office, the 
other by the office of the World. One 
cannot now imagine a London without 
Ptmch. It seems curious to think that 
such a publication should ever have been 
called the London Charivari \ so little of 
the Charivari is, or ever was, about 
thoroughly English Mr. Punch. Never from 
first to last was there a flavour of anything 
that was not thoroughly British about Mr. 
Punch : his prejudices — and what prejudices 
he did show now and again ! — were 
thoroughly English. But how healthy, pure, 
and manly his humour always ! A Paris 
comic paper makes its stock-in-trade of one 
subject only — illicit love. Mr. Punch never 
saw any fun in the fact that a husband was 
deceiving his fond wife, or that a wife was 
carrying on an intrigue with her credulous 
husband's closest friend. Mr. Punch could 
have been as droll about this as any French- 
man of them all if he saw any fun or drollery 
in it ; but, bless his honest, manly heart ! he 



1 88 C/iariiic Cross to St. PaiiF s 



did not, and we are all greatly obliged to him 
for it. Mr. Punch started as a rather ex- 
treme Radical in the days of Douglas Jerrold 
and Tom Hood and Thackeray. He went 
in a good deal for the " man-and-a-brother " 
principle ; he was much in sympathy with the 
prolcHaire. One of his many ephemeral rivals 
satirised him, I remember, by publishing the 
titles of various poems humorously alleged to 
have appeared in the pages of Punch — 
'* Sit down by me, my shoeless brother " ; 
"Come, share my lodging, honest tramp," 
and such like ; but Mr. Punch soon got out 
of that humour, and no one could think of 
satirising him after that fashion now. But 
the praise that I have given Punch no 
enemy could deny him. During all his long 
reign he has had genius and art to help him, 
and he has had purity too. See what a crowd 
is peering into his windows, where you be- 
hold the pages of far-back numbers displayed, 
and may study a caricature of " Pam," or of 
" Dizzy," or even of Brougham and O'Connell. 
Some of the cartoons must surely be a rare 










* 'vQ I'M 



'"SI 








■a 






/.-%t*«l«» 




ST. DUNSTAN S IN THK WKST 



I'hcl SI reel 



\()\ 



|)ii//l(; to tlic sclioolhoys wlu) stare at llicni 
ihroiimli the windows; there ai"e inenilxis ol 
Parliament, (l()nl)tless, who would at this hoiu" 
he nnal)le to explain the nieaninL; ol this or 
thai hinnoi'oiis oi'onpini^ ; l)iit the (h-avvini; Is 
always so adinirahle and .so hill ol lile and 
niovenienl that people look at it and stick 
to il lor its own sake. I always stop at that 
/*iiiii// corner, and ti'y to '^vX close up to 
the window pane and stare delielUed. 

At the other .side ol the litth' coiirl stands 
the ll'oj/d ollice. 'Idle idinipse of that 
little coni't is a |)i'etly i)ictiire. ( )ne }-;ets a 
siidtlen, Mne.xpected impression ol trees and 
old houses, and th(; stone tower ol a church. 
The church tower looks ancient and time- 
honoured a little out ol kee|)inL;', seemiliely, 
with the modern humours ol Mr. IMuu h and 
the Society L;()ssi|) ol .\llas. Hut there is 
really no incongruity ; lile is all like that, and 
would he nmch less interestini,; il it were not 
so. lake the oldest and most veiierahle 
church in l'jiL;land ; when it was in its jouth 
there was satirical talk and Society j^ossip i^oinj^ 



192 



Charing Cross to St. PauVs 



on under the shadow of its spires and towers. 
That which it was famiHar with in its youth 
it need not be ashamed at in its old age. 
The World, too, was Hke Punch an 




THE WINDOWS OF "PUNCH' 



innovation. Like Punch, it had numerous 
imitators and rivals who soon dropped out 
of rivalry, and some who still hold on in 
the competition. The JVor/d started, for 
England, the popular and personal Society 







:^t//. 




ST. Bl< IDE's I'ASSAGli 

o 



Fleet Street 195 



journal. The Owl was altog(;th("r a differ- 
ent sort of thing ; it was very clever and 
very brilliant, no doubt, but its cleverness 
and brilliancy were meant for the circles 
which have the Foreign Office as their centre, 
while Atlas naturally appeals iirbi et o?-t>i\ 
to all. I do not often agree with th(^ political 
opinions of the World, but one must re- 
cognise the fact that here is a clever Society 
paper which a young woman may read. 
Gossip — personal gossip ? No doubt per- 
sonal gossii) is an objectionable thing from the; 
point of view of the higher morality ; and of 
course the point of view of the higher morality 
ought to be the point of view of every one of 
us. Only it is not. And we do nearly all of 
us indulge, and even delight, in personal 
gossip, even when it is spiced with a little 
scandal. Is it not something, then, to have 
our personal gossip served up to us by clever 
men — and I suppose I may say by clever 
women — by men and women of education, 
who understand and instinctively feel where 
the line ou<j:ht to be; drawn, and to whom it 



196 Cliaring Cross to St. Paiiis 

comes natural to distinguish between the 
gossip which causes a smile and the gossip 
which compels a blush? I daresay I should 
feel loftily proud of my austere virtue if I 
could declare with truth (or concerning 
"Truth,") that I never read these Society 
papers. But I do read them, and shall con- 
tinue doing so — and go to, then ! 

More of the boyish population crowd 
around the windows of Piiiick than around 
the panes of the JTorAt. Punch has 
cartoons, the U^orld has none ; and the 
boy, as a rule, takes but slight interest in the 
doings of Belgravia, and the Court drawing- 
rooms, and the interchange of friendly 
badinage between "Edmund" and " Henry." 
But observe the totally different sort of crowd 
around the windows of the Sporting Ncivs ! 
What a number of billycock hats ! and what 
an expressive article of headgear the billycock 
hat becomes on the head of a Londoner! 
Look at the open-mouthed hobbledehoy with 
his hands thrust loosely into his pockets ! 
Every hat is expressive, but I think the 




SrOUTING LIFIC" OFl'ICE 



Fleet Street 199 

billycock tells its story best of all. The 
shovel hat may deceive ; it may sometimes- — 
not to speak irreverently — cover the brows 
that a billycock would have more appropri- 
ately adorned. Many of the curiously anti- 
quated hats worn by ancient members of the 
House of Peers may likewise lend themselves 
to an imposition. There may now and then 
be levity, frivolity, a very passion for idle 
amusement, concealed beneath these relics of 
the past. I have often wondered, by the way, 
where these aged peers get these "quaint 
and olden" hats! No man now sees such a 
headpiece in a hatter's shop. Do the aged 
peers insist on having the hats specially built 
for them after some venerable fantasy of their 
own ? Or did it happen that in various cases a 
young nobleman of the time of D'Orsay or 
Tom Duncombe's brightest years, or Lynd- 
hurst's dressy days, was smitten with a passion 
for some particular beaver, and vowed that he 
would wear that pattern, and that pattern 
only, till death did him and it part ? Then did 
each man go to his hatter and leave with him 



200 Charing Cross to St. PauVs 

a pattern, and insist that that, and that alone, 
must be supplied to him during the rest of his 
existence ? It may be so ; we all know about 
the shepherd's -plaid trousers which were 
repeated and reproduced for Brougham while 
generations of perpetual change rolled on. 
Count Cavour was intensely fond of one 
costume — a snuff-coloured swallowtail, with 
trousers and waistcoat to correspond : his 
tailor had instructions to supply him with that 
costume, and that costume only. Perhaps the 
hats of the ancient peers are furnished on the 
same principle. But I have wandered far 
from the Sporting Life and the billycock 
to the House of Lords and its old-world hats, 
and even to the arcades of Turin and the 
snuff-coloured coat of the great Cavour. 

Then there is the office of the Daily 
News, the advertising and selling office — 
the office in Fleet Street. An eager crowd 
has gathered in front of its windows — some 
important news has been placarded ; but it is 
an earnest crowd, with not many boys or 
billycocks in it. How these Fleet Street 



Fleet Street 201 

newspaper offices are making Fleet Street 
a palatial thoroughfare in our days ! The 
Telegraph, the Standard, the Clironiiic—ih^^y 
are like some of the great American news- 
paper offices in vastness, in arrangement, and 
in splendour. Admiring all these, however, 
yet let me be allowed to tell of the positive 
fascination wrought upon me by one collection 
of old houses a little more westward in Fleet 
Street, which appear to be a very rookery of 
newspaper offices and all manner of public 
institutions, 'J hese houses are very old. 
They are highly picturescjue. No doubt 
they are as hrm and staunch and strong as 
they are old ; but that is not the impression 
given to the ignorant and superficial gazer — 
to me, for example. They seem marked out 
and "girdled" for speedy demolition. The 
odd thoucrht comes into the mind that the 
various newspaper agents have simply taken 
possession of them as squatting families have 
settled down in ruined piles; or that the news- 
papers have swooped on them only for the 
purpose of hanging out each his banner on 



202 C/iariitg Cross lo St. Pauls 

the outward walls for the business of adver- 
lisciiUMU. I read the names of famous 
j)ro\ineial journals — o'i musical joinnals ; I 
read. too. i^f various companies and institu- 
ticMis ; and I read ot scMnebodv's ovster-rcioms. 

The whole place looks otldlv like a dilapi- 
dated hi\(.\ riu'se hoiisc^s will be pulled 
down probably some early tla\-. and hand- 
some structures will oi-ow up in their stead. 

Then the great provincial newspa[)er offices, 
and the odicc^s o\. the musical journals, and 
the companies and institutions, will loi^k quite 
in their rl^ht place, and there will be no 
incongruous suggestion of progress and 
prosperity taking up their home among ruins, 
Init will the sight be quite so picturesque 
then for the searching Doctor Syntax of the 
London streets ? Perhaps not. The incon- 
gruous is surely very often an inq^ortant 
element in the creation ^^{ the picturesque. 

An elderly man. in a deer-stalker hat, is 
seen about this part of the street. I mean 
he is seen in Mr. rennell's sketch, and Mr. 
Tennells sketch is just as good as the street 



m ' ' 



Wi lii, H(w;v 



H \u%yV£f''/r% 














'. J\ 










" nAII.Y NKWS" OKKICK 



Fleet Street 205 

— just as real as the strc^ct. I know that 
elderly man, but he does not come from 
Sheffield, in the sense of the phrase which 
belongs to that i)opular piece, "A Pair of 
Spectacles." I know the man — at least, I 
know the kind of man. I lis face was hand- 
some, it is still delicate and rt;fined ; a little 
wasted, a little pinched even, but "cheery 
still," like Abou-ben- Adhem, may whose 
tribe increase ! Our friend in th(; deer- 
stalker has had some troubk; in his lime, 
llemy of Navarre said of himself that the 
wind of adversity blowing early and long 
in his face turned his hair [)rematLn'c?ly 
white. So it has (;vid(Mit]y been with our 
friend. His has a gentle, subdued ex- 
pression about his eyes and lips. He; has 
not got on well in life. lie has a wife and a 
large fmiily — all daught(;rs. II is is exactly 
the appearance of a man who has only 
daughters. He is intensely fond of his wife 
and the girls, and his wife and the girls arc 
intensely fond of him. Hut the girls still 
believe in him, and the wife has long since, 



2o6 C/iarino- Cross /o S/. Pan/'s 

gently and considerately, ceased to do so. 
When I say she has ceased to believe in 
him, I mean that she has ceased to believe 
in his projects and in his capacity for success. 
As to his personal integrity, his unselfish- 
ness, and his love, her faith in him has waxed 
rather than waned since the day they were 
married, at the time when every one said he 
was a rising young man certain to get on. 
But she no longer believes in his plans, his 
projects, his new ways of making money — 
she has outlived too many of them. She is 
resigned, however, and is happy, knowing 
his worth. The girls have still the fullest, 
and even the proudest, faith in everything 
he undertakes. They will probably all get 
married — they are just the girls whom 
sensible and honest young men would like to 
marry- — ^and papa will always be a hero to 
them. Poor dear man ! he is a failure in 
many ways — in most ways — but not in all. 
A man cannot be said to have wholly failed 
in life whose wife loves him to the last, 
and who is always a hero in the eyes of his 



Fleet Street 207 



daughters. There are many great worldly 
successes not f|uite so enviable as that. 

The traffic becomes perplexed, seemingly 
inextricable, seemingly impossible, as we get 
on towards Ludgate Circus. I have already 
tried to do justice to the heroic figure of the 
policeman, standing in the midst of the rush 
and surge and swirl, upright and motionless, 
like the Eddystone amid the stormy waves. 
Let me try to describe another heroic figure 
of a different kind. Be pleased to look at 
that omnibus trying to thread its way 
through that moving mass of horses, wheels, 
and men. Where is that omnibus to get to .'* 
How can it edge itself in any farther.'* It 
must come into collision with something ; it 
must upset something or be upset — perhaps 
upset and be upset. It is leaning over 
ominously to one side already, like a sailing 
yacht in a squall. Now look at the driver 
seated on his box. Does he seem dismayed } 
Does he seem even anxious ? Not he! He 
is listening with an air of keen and wide- 
awake interest to something that a passenger 



2o8 Charing Cross to St. Paiifs 

on the box-seat is telling him. Perhaps it 
is a good story, and there is a whimsical 
expression on the driver's face which would 
seem to warrant such an assumption. Any- 
how his attention appears to be all absorbed 
in the story, or whatever it is, as if the worst 
perils of the traffic had no concern for him ; 
as if no one had ever heard of a collision in 
the streets of the City. But do you suppose 
that he has not his eyes and enough of his 
mind on the traffic, and on his own task ? 
Of course he has. He knows what he is 
about. Half an eye is enough for him. He 
is master of his subject. He can spare ear 
and interest enough for the talk of his 
companion ; he misses not a point of it : but 
he can mind his own business all the time. 
No collision for him ; he will upset nothing, 
and be upset by nothing. Now, this is a 
different kind of heroic figure from the other. 
There are heroes who are silent, stern, un- 
moved on the battlefield, wholly wrapped up 
in the business of battle. There are heroes 
who must take battle itself easily and lightly. 



Fleet Street 209 



and who can make or enjoy a joke at the 
moment when preparing to charge. Let us 
recognise the heroism of both orders of hero, 
and just feel a preference according to our 
own personal inclination, I invite no decision 
between my grave and statuesque policeman 
and my easy, happy-go-lucky omnibus-driver. 
Each is a characteristic figure of the London 
streets, and each has been given to us by Mr, 
Pennell with a fidelity and sympathy which 
is in itself an inspiration. Each is given to 
us in his habit as he lives, just as you may 
see him in the City every day. 

Fleet Street is all contrasts, for any one 
who will only allow a little ray of fancy to 
help him with its divining light. We have 
seen our heroic policeman and our heroic 
cabman. Now let us cast a glance at that 
trim little milliner with her two bundles. 
She trips along bravely through all " the 
thunderous smother '" — the phrase, I think, is 
from a poem of Leigh Hunt's — and it does 
not disturb her nerves in the least. But the 
contrast I was going to draw is not between 

p 



2 10 Char'uig Cross to St. PaiiTs 

her and anybody else — I was only going to 
say that the office of Messrs. Cook has just 
come into sioht. You don't see the contrast. 
You ask, "What contrast?" There is the 
most home-keeping creature in London 
perhaps, and yonder is Cook's Tourist's 
Office, where you can take a ticket to go 
anywhere over the world or round the world. 
For any one with an inborn love of travel to 
go into such an office is as tantalising as to 
ramble among the Liverpool docks or along 
the quays of Marseilles, and see the vessels 
that are coming from and going to the far- 
off ports to which one's yearning heart and 
fancy strain. That tourist office is tapestried 
with announcements of return tickets to and 
from all the famous places of the globe. 
The Rhine ? Well, the name of the Rhine 
makes one melancholy, for the world of to- 
day has wellnigh forgotten the Rhine. 
Byron sang of it ; Disraeli apostrophised it 
in passionate rhetoric, wherein he appealed 
to it as " River of my youth ! " — and the 
Rhine is as lovely as ever — and who raves 



Flee I St reel 2 1 I 

al)()Lit it now? Alas! rivers come into 
fashion and go out of it, like other things. 
Switzerland, of course, Italy, the Danube, the 
Bosphorus, the Nile, the Holy LlukI, India, 
Japan, China. Ah ! what delightful and yet 
torturing invitations to some who cannot 
accept them ! But our little milliner now — 
she would not care. She does not want to 
see Karnak and the Tombs of the Kings : 
the name of the Taj-Mahal awakens in her 
mind no manner of interest. She would hate 
the idea of being packed off to China or 
Japan. The passion for travel, for wander- 
ing, for seeing new places. Is In the breast of 
every boy ; but girls do not, as a rule, take 
any interest in " Sinbad the Sailor." Some 
women of education do, indeed, get a passion 
for travel and even for exploring. Most of 
us know women who have made themselves 
famous as travellers and even as exj)1orers. 
But to the ordinary girl, even to the ordinary 
educated girl, much travel Is a mere bore. 
As for our little milliner, the Idea of travelling 
abroad never entered into her head. What 



2 1 2 Charing Cross to St. Paurs 

would be the good if it did ? How could 
she travel ? Yet the same would apply to 
her young man, her sweetheart — and we may 
be sure he never passes Cook's or Gaze's 
office without lingering long and longingly at 
the windows, and studying the announce- 
ments, and siofhino: with a desire to have a 
ticket for everywhere. He and the little 
milliner have been to Greenwich and to 
Epping, and that is travel enough for her. 
But he yearns for something farther off, and 
perhaps when they are married and doing 
pretty well he may take her for a little trip to 
Dieppe and to Paris. We may be sure that 
the impulse will be his and not hers — that he 
will delight in the trip and she will put up 
with it. 



VII 

LUDGATE HILL 

The railway bridge that crosses Ludgate 
Hill was once the occasion of a fierce contro- 
versy. It was a struggle between the artistic 
and the practical — between the aesthetic and 
the economic. It was the old controversy — 
not quite so old as the hills, but certainly as 
old as the very first time when industrial 
science of the rudest form began to turn the 
hills to account for the supposed benefit of 
man. Why, then, should not Ludgate Hill 
come on for her turn in the discussion ? 
Ludgate Hill "waited for her time — which 
time came," as Carlyle says, discoursing on a 
quite different subject. The time came when 
it was proposed to span Ludgate Hill with this 



214 



C/iariiio Cross to St. Paul's 



railway bridge. As may be seen by Mr. 
Pennell's sketch, the railway bridoc itself is 




^M^m^%\ 



Tin; RAM. WAV HKIOGK, I.IDGATK HII.I. 

by no means an unlovely object. Regarded 
as a railway bridge merely, it is rather a fine 
work of art. Its iron tracery is delicate and 
picturesque. But then, as a bridge crossing 



Lndgate Hill 2 r 5 

Ludgatc Hill and cutting off fmm l^cct 
Street the view of St. Paul's — how al)out it 
when considered in that way ? Thus the 
controversy arose. Mr. Ruskin struck in 
with characteristic gallantry, and condemned 
the practical principle which would spoil so 
fine a street view for the convenience of a 
railway and its passengers. I remember 
favouring the public with some opinions of 
my own on the same subject in a newspaper 
with which I was then connected, and which 
newspaper I have long outlived. My 
opinions merely said ditto to Mr. Ruskin. 
Yes, it was a fine street view — one of the 
finest street views in London — which met the 
eyes of those who looked up from Fk^et 
Street to Ludgate Ilill and St. Paul's. It 
was a grand historic sight. Many of the old 
houses were still standing, and the whole 
scene retained much of its mediaeval aspect. 
Let it be frankly owned that the view is 
spoiled now^ — utterly spoiled. The railway 
bridcfe bounds the horizon of one walkinof 
from Fleet Street. lie sees nothing but 



2i6 C/iariiii^- Cross to St. Paul's 

tliat ; thinks of nothing but that. Perhaps I 
should rather put it this way — he hardly sees 
the bridge, for he does not think about it ; 
but he sees nothing, also, and thinks of 
nothing. Now, in the old days, a goodly 
proportion v>'i the wayfarers could hardly fail 
to be struck by the hill, and the Cathedral on 
its brow. But then the men of practical 
progress, even if they are willing to admit all 
this, will ask us what are the artistic or 
astliolic glimpses of a few visionaries and 
dreamers when compared with the comfort 
and the convenience <>{ the thousands and 
thousands who pass along in the railway, 
backwards and forwards, every day ? 

There it is, you see. If the controversy 
were to go on all over again, I shoukl not 
take part in it. Not that I have changed 
my opinions in the least as to the general 
principle or as to this particular instance. 
Hut where is the good of arguing on such a 
subject ? The artistic always goes down 
before what is called the practical in a matter 
like that. " Keep ycnir breath to cool your 




mem'' ■ ■ "' 




W/W:'^M 










'(SKL # 









I.UDflATK flKCUS 



Litdgatc Hill 219 

porridge," was a good old Scottish proverb. 
Keep your controversial ardour for something 
in which it may possibly prevail. Against 
railway bridges, and telegraph wires, and 
other such works, it is of no account. 
Against the genius of street placard and 
advertisement it is of no account. The most 
beautiful and venerable parts of our most 
venerable and stately structures must be 
accounted as of nothing when the genius of 
Civilisation has need of a blow-hole on the 
road hard by. We are not worse than other 
civilised peoples. We are only doing as the 
Romans do — -observe the recent improve- 
ments in what a Complete Letter-writer calls 
"the Imperial City of the Caesars." There 
will be tramways in Jerusalem yet — perhaps 
there are such already ; some years have 
passed since I was in Jerusalem. I^oes any 
one know a lovelier river than the fludson, 
about West Point ? I do not. But the 
rocks on the margin are utilised for the 
purpose of advertising in flaring characters 
the virtues of this man's bitters and that 



220 C/iarino Cross to St. Pauls 



•e> 



olhci" mans pills. Thcrctore I, for one, give 
u[) the fight. Lot Mr. Ruskin battle on; he 
is " possessed," in the demoniac sense, by a 
principle ; lie has a mission. I would en- 
courage him and wish him success, if there 
were the slightest ho[ie ; but there is not. 
So why slunild London wait — for the effacing 
and reccMistructing lingers o\. modern utility 'i 
Let them efface ; let them reconstruct. Some 
of us can still see in memory the Ludgate 
Mill that was. Most oS. us do not care what 
it was, or what it is, or what it is to be. But 
I may be alKnvcnl to express a little regret 
that Mr. l\'nnell did not see it and sketch it 
before the beginning oi the process which is 
to improve it " from the face of all creation — 
off the face i:>{ all creation." Some words 
which I read lately in a most touching story 
by M. Anatole France, come back to my 
memory poignantly : " I grow sad, some- 
times," says the noble old scholar who is 
su[iposed to tell the story, " to think that the 
effort which we make — we cultured persons, 
so called — to retain and [^reserve dead things 



l.ui{i^aU' 1 1 ill 2 2 I 

is a weary and a vain effort. All that has 
lived is the necessary aliment of new 
existences. The Aral) who hiiilds himself 
a iuit with the marhles of the temj)les of 
I'.ilmyra is more philosophic than all the con- 
servators (jf the nuiseums of London, of 
Paris, and of Munich." So says the vener- 
able hero of " I'he crime of .Silvestn^ 
Bonnard, Memlx^r ol the Institute." Then 
what a j)hil()Soi)her was the Turk who, like; a 
practical scjldier, used the pillars and statues 
of the l-*arthenon as targets ! lUit dear old 
M. Bonnard did not mean what he said. I !<; 
was in a mood of despondency— a mood of 
despair. He was giving up the fight he had 
fought so long in vain, lie had not Mr. 
Ruskin's mission. lie threw down his 
broken sword, but could not resist the 
temptation to lling a few words of sarcasm 
and scorn in the face of the confjuering 
Utility. 

What a turmoil there is about laidgate 
Circus! What njofs, what tel(,'graph wires 
— what placards, ensigns, advertisements 



222 Charino- Cross to St. Paul' s 



high in air — what omnibuses, carriages, 
carts, cabs, donkey-carts, the cart which the 
costermonger pushes before him, the mail- 
carts, the carts of the Star newspaper, 
equally red with those of Her Majesty's mail, 
the oblong carts of the Parcel Post — all 
these are on the earth, and make the firm 
ground look like a quaking bog. The great 
signs that are hung out across the fronts of 
houses, and on the tops of houses, make 
Ludgate Circus look like a part of New 
York. The Obelisk rises out of the throng 
in the street like a solitary camel's head out 
of the crowd of a pilgrimage. The spire 
rising out of the pell-mell has more signifi- 
cance. It invites us all to look up — up — 
above " the city's rout and noise and 
humming." I wonder how many wayfarers 
in each day are touched by the appeal of the 
spire and look upwards ! I wonder how 
many who do look upwards are impelled 
thereto by the spire's silent admonition, and 
are the better for it ! That man yonder now 
— he is looking up. He is gazing upwards 










/''^^> 



Jl 1 ' 















^'h/l Hilll iJ^'yT .v'A T\rf ?i' 



I" 




U'^m 



"'¥€ 



^ 



VVILU S HOTEL 



Ludgate Hill 225 

very earnestly — so earnestly that he runs 
into the chest of a rough-looking person in a 
fur cap, who is walking westward and striv- 
ing the while to keep his eyes on something 
eastward. The two collide, and our sky- 
gazer makes an apology which sounds like 
an imprecation. Was that all the lesson he 
learned from the teaching of the church 
spire ? No ; he would have learned some- 
thing better if he had sought teaching there. 
But he was only looking up to the sky to see 
if it was going to rain. He was put into a 
bad humour by the ominous aspect of the 
closing and darkening clouds, and so when 
the chance collision took place he was in the 
mood for an imprecation. By the way, do 
not look for the men or the collision in Mr. 
Pennell's sketch ; they are my own invention. 
Mr. Pennell's pencil is too good to be em- 
ployed in working out such poor conceits. 

The only thing worth noticing in this 
poor conceit is that it illustrates a peculiarity 
of the London streets, which I have long 
been observing with a certain interest. 



2 26 C ha ring Cross to St. PauTs 

Along London pavements — and I suppose 
the pavements of other cities as well — the 
men and women of what I may call, for want 
of any better term, the educated classes, 
walk straight on with their eyes to the front 
of them. If they want to look into a shop 
window they stop in their walk, go up to the 
shop window, and look into it. But while 
they are on the march they look before them. 
Now observe the men and women, the lads 
and lasses, of what we must call, for lack of 
a better word, the uneducated class. You 
will observe that five out of every six of 
them are walking one way and looking 
another way. Something a little distance 
behind him has caught a man's attention. 
It may be an organ and a monkey, it may 
be an Oriental foreigner, it may be an 
upset hansom or a fallen horse, it may be 
anything". He cannot take his eyes from it, 
and so he keeps on walking backwards. He 
is moving, indeed, towards his destination, 
but he still looks back to that he has left 
behind him. Observe Mary Jane — or shall 



Liidgate Hill 227 



we say Betsinda ? — with her perambulator 
and her two young" charges. She drives 
them on directly, recklessly, remorselessly ; 
but all the time her eyes are with her heart, 
and that is in the shop windows, where all 
the beautiful, beautiful things are displayed 
for sale — the bonnets, the unmade-up silks, 
the mantles of stamped velvet, the gauzy 
dresses, the bewitching under-things that the 
Queen of the Fairies might wear, so delight- 
fully gossamer - like are they. She steers 
her perambulator into groups of infuriated 
pedestrians ; she rattles the bones of the 
infants not only over the stones of the side- 
walk, but over many living toes and insteps 
and up sharply against human ankles. 
Elderly ladies will deliberately stop, and 
admonish and scold and threaten her. They 
demand the name of her mistress, in order 
that they may be enabled to lodge formal 
complaint against her. Betsinda cares little 
for all that. When the row is over she 
looks before her, and steers straight for some 
thirty seconds or so. Then her head turns 



228 Charing Cross to St. Paiifs 

on its axis again, her eyes gaze sideward. 
She is with the bonnets and the dresses once 
more, and with fearless faith she commits 
her precious burden to the care of the 
powers above. 

If any one has not noticed this condition 
of facts, this curious distinction of classes, I 
can only pray him to open his eyes when 
next he makes his way through a crowded 
street in London, and then say whether 
my general observation is not correct. I 
suppose the philosophical explanation is not 
far to seek. The working man is hurrying 
to his work — he is tied to time. Betsinda 
has been sent out for a clearly - defined 
hour or two hours. The whistling errand- 
boy must get his errands done within at least 
plausible distance of punctuality and prompt- 
ness. The young woman with the washing- 
is already looked for here and there. These 
people cannot afford to lounge. If they 
have hurried past some sight that interests 
them they cannot quietly turn back, and 
composedly feast their eyes upon it. All 



L^tdgate Hill 229 



they can do they do — and that is to keep 
looking sidewards or backwards, and retain 
it within their range of vision as long as they 
may, while still hurrying onward in the other 
direction — careless of collision, regardless of 
reproach. The boy, of course, is the most 
reckless of all. He will come rattling along 
the pavement at a hand-gallop, with his head 
positively twisted behind him like that of a 
professional contortionist. No matter what 
the risk to himself or to others, he will not 
lose sight of anything that amuses or in- 
terests him so long as his straining eyes in 
his contorted head can hold it within his 
perverse horizon. If he gets into a collision 
with some steady wayfarer he does not mind. 
Indeed, he considers it prime fun. The 
threats of an elderly gentleman have no 
terror for him ; at the worst he can run much 
quicker than the elderly gentleman. For 
the admonitions of an elderly lady he has no 
ear. He interrupts her lecture, perhaps, by 
some disparaging remark upon her bonnet ; 
possibly he asks her, with sudden affectation 



230 C//an'uo' Cross to St. Paurs 

of friendly and intimate interest, "What 
price that ? " He does not wait to hear 
what the cost of the article may have been, 
but plunges whistling on his way. The 
attempted admonition has done nothing but 
to make the elderly lady, her very self, an 
object of droll curiosity to him, and he now 
keeps his head twisted backward to enjoy as 
long as he can the sight of her bewilderment 
and her futile anoer. 

Do not ascend Ludgate Hill without 
bestowing a thought on Paternoster Row. 
Manv an anxious heart has beat hierh as 
the owner and bearer of the heart paused in 
trepidation on the threshold of some house 
in the Row. To the young and timid 
author the place was holy ground. Many 
such aspirants must have felt inclined to put 
their somewhat broken shoes from off their 
feet in an cHort at propitiation. The place 
is less distinctively, less exclusively, literary 
now than it was in former days. There are 
publishers now in Piccadilly and the Strand, 
and Oxford Street, and Albemarle Street, 





















-' a 111' 



V, m^ 












ST. martin's, MIDGATK 



Ludgate Hill 233 

and Burlington Street, and Covent Garden, 
and Cornhill, and many other places ; hut 
some of the greatest of publishing houses 
still hold on to the Row, and several newer 
houses have started life there. Talk of 
London ghosts — talk of haunted London — 
what region could be more ghost-frequented 
than Paternoster Row ? The ghosts of all 
the literary projects which perished in their 
early youth ; the novels, the poems, the 
essays, the volumes of travel, the transla- 
tions, which died in Paternoster Row — which 
the public would not keep alive, which the 
world only too willingly let die ! I should 
think that at every midnight there must be 
as many spectral forms in that gloomy lane 
as were gathered at the midnight revic^w of 
the dead Napoleon in the German poem. I 
would go there some midnight to see, only 
for fear of one pale little ghost which I do 
not wish to meet : it is the ghost of a volume 
of translations from a foreign poet, at which 
I once toiled. Let it pass ; let us speak no 
more of it. There was to me one comfort 



234 CJiaring Cross to St. Paul's 

in its failure. No one knew anything about 
it. The reproach of the death fell not on 
my head. I name it not. As Beranger 
said of Waterloo, "Its name shall never 
sadden page of mine." 

St Paul's ! We are standincr inside the 
great doorway which looks upon the statue 
of Queen Anne, and the railway bridge, and 
the crowd below. Few people who pass 
hurriedly by have any idea of the simplicity, 
the sympathy, the solemnity of that entrance 
— that porch. Mr. Pennell has put but a 
few — a very few — figures there. A young- 
man stands on the threshold and looks down 
on the perpetual movement of the street. A 
girl is just about to go down the steps and 
plunge into the living stream. A man and 
woman have just come within the porch. 
They are strangers evidently ; they look with 
awe. and move with reverential slowness. 
The man has already taken off his hat. Dr. 
Johnson would approve of him. The whole 
sketch admirably suggests the presence of a 
solemn sanctuarv. It is a sanctuarv — a 



Ludgate Hill 235 



sanctuary from the crowd, and the rush of 
business, and the struggle for money, and all 
the incarnate vulgarities of common daily life. 
It ought to do one's soul some good just to 
look up at that great temple as he passes on 
his way. Within all is quiet. No service is 
going on, but the organ is breathing, and 
there are a few listeners scattered here and 
there in the cool semi-darkness. St. Paul s 
is well placed — there in the very thick of the 
crowd and the traffic. It would show to 
more advantage, no doubt, if it were set upon 
an open plateau. I knew a dreamy man 
once who had a great ambition. He wanted 
to be rich, enormously rich, and for what do 
you think ? That he might buy up all the 
houses round St. Paul's, and all the ware- 
houses and wharves between it and the river, 
and clear them completely away, and allow 
the cathedral to stand revealed in all its pro- 
portions, isolated on a broad clear elevation 
above the Thames. My friend's was indeed 
an artistic and an exalted ambition. With 
what pride the Londoner — with what fresh 



2^6 Charins: Cross to St. Paii/'s 



■3 



delight and wonder the stranger — would 
see that dome and those walls rising unin- 
terrupted, undisfigured, in full display above 
the Thames ! Where in the heart of any 
great city would there be such another view 
of a grand cathedral ? But, after all, is it not 
better as it is ? Is not the place of such a 
cathedral more fittingly set in and amidst the 
crowd ? The work of the pastor does not lie 
in picturesque and dignified solitude, but 
among the houses, and the cottages, and the 
garrets. I always think in this way of St. 
Paul's. Let it stand there with the waves of 
the world's traffic beating on its very steps. 
Some wayfarer may come ashore now and 
then and mount the steps, and enter the quiet 
and darkling church, and be reminded that the 
city is not all the world and all the worlds. I 
like to think of that dome risino- hicjh above 
all those roofs, and chimneys, and gables, and 
signs, and advertisements, and telegraph wires. 
I do not care to think of the whispering-gallery 
and the show-places of any kind, or even of 
the tomb of " the Duke " himself, or of any of 



Litdgate Hill 237 

the curious monuments in which half-draped 
personages from classic mythology pretend to 
be in grief over sturdy British soldiers and 
sailors. I do not care for the hum and drone 
of the verger explaining all about his sights. 
All that has, to my mind, nothing to do with 
the reality of St. Paul's. The mission of St. 
Paul's, to iny thinking, is in its standing 
firmly planted there, in the very centre of the 
commonplace traffic, and bearing its silent 
testimony to other and greater realities. It 
stands and lifts its dome into the air, and its 
dome is surmounted by that Cross, which 
surely any creed or sect of men who are 
worshippers of anything may recognise to be, 
as this very Cross on St. Paul's was described 
in the last generation by a great parliamentary 
orator who was not of the English Church, 
" a sign of hope — a signal of salvation ! " 



VIll 

ST. Paul's 

What a natural habil it is to personate into 
living and even into human lonn some inan- 
imate object or structure with which one has 
become familiar and which is dear ! No 
wonder that in the days of the Dryads people 
oave life and character and human svm- 
pathies to every tree and fountain and 
river which they had long known and which 
they loved. W^e nearly all find ourselves 
doing much the same sort of thing with 
buildings which wo have lono- known, and 
which have grown to be in a certain sense 
a part of our existence. I always thus 
endow St, Paul's Cathedral with life and 
human nature and sympathy. I cannot 



■S/. Paul's 239 

well explain what early associations and 
chances have made St. Paul's a more living 
influence to me than the much grander and 
nobler Westminster Abbey ; but so it is, 
and I feel as if St. Paul's were a living in- 
fluence over all that region of the metropolis 
which is surveyed by its ball and its cross. 
But in another sense it is unlike other build- 
ings to me. It is not one long-lived, long- 
lived cathedral ; it is rather a generation of 
cathedrals. Westminster Abbey takes us 
back in unbroken continuity of history to the 
earlier days of England's budding greatness. 
Westminster itself, nevertheless, was only 
called so in the beginning to distinguish it from 
the earlier East Minster, which was either the 
existing St. Paul's or a cathedral standing on 
Tower Ilill. It would seem, then, that St. 
Paul's rather than Westminster Abbey ought 
to represent the gradual movement of English 
history and English thought, and the growth 
of the metropolis. But observe the difference. 
Westminster Abbey has always, since its 
erection in the old days about the time when 



240 C/iariNi^- Cross to St. Pauls 

Pan was definitely giving up the use of his 
Pagan horn, been sedately watching over 
London. It has been reconstructed here and 
there, of course — repaired and renovated, 
touched up and decorated with new adorn- 
ments in tribute of grateful piety ; but it 
is ever and always the same Westminster 
Abbey. Now observe the history of St. 
Paul's. St. Paul's has fallen and died time 
after time, and been revived and restored. 
It has risen new upon new generations. It 
has perished in tlame again and again, like a 
succession of martyrs, and has come up afresh 
and with new -spangled ore tlamed in the 
forehead of the mornino- skv. St. Paul's is a 
religious or ecclesiastical dynasty rather than 
a cathedral. It has been destroyed so often, 
and has risen aoain in so manv different 
shapes, that it seems as if each succeeding 
age were putting its fresh stamp and mint- 
mark on it, and so commending it to the 
special service of each new generation. One 
cannot but think that — let its authorities, its 
Dean and Chapter, and the rest, take all the 



S/. Pau/'s 241 

best and most devoted care they can of it — 
St. Paul's is not destined to hold its present 
shape for a very long stretch of time. I do 
not desire my words to be like the story of 
the watchful and warned parent which is 
found in all literatures, from ^sop and the 
Arabian Nights downwards — the story of 
the father who is warned that an early death 
is impending over his dear and only son, and 
who locks the boy for greater security into a 
lofty tower or into a subterranean cavern — 
the tale is told in different ways — and behold 
it is all of no use, for the very precautions 
taken to save the lad only tend to his earlier 
and surer destruction. It may be thus with 
the Cathedral of St. Paul's. I hope the Dean 
and Chapter will not think me ill-omened with 
my propheciesof evil. I hope they will not feel 
to me as is usually felt by less considerate 
and enlightened persons towards even the 
well-intentioned who set out to warn and to 
alarm with forebodings of evil things to come. 
I have no warning to give, and therein I am 
no doubt less excusable than most of those 



242 Charing Cross to St. Paul's 

who forecast sad troubles, for I cannot pre- 
tend to have any idea of what the danger is, 
or how it may be averted, or whence it is to 
arrive. I know nothing about it. and the 
Dean and Chapter themselves do not wish 
well to their noble Cathedral more cordially 
than 1 do. Hut I keep thinking of the past, 
anti 1 cannot help murmuring to myself that 
the mission of St. Paul's is. as I have said, to 
be a succession or dynasty of cathedrals, and 
not to be one perennial structure with time- 
proof and fire-proof walls and an unbroken 
history. 

This birth and re -birth give, to my 
thinking, an entirely peculiar interest to St, 
Paul's Cathedral. Think what its different 
generations could have told to all around ! 
Another great church — Westminster Abbey, 
for example — grows up amid growing history, 
and is a part o'i its gradual movement, and 
so does not notice it. Each day makes its 
slight and almost imperceptible change, and 
the cathedral changes with the day, and is all- 
unconscious o{ it. Westminster Abbey could 














'..^.-<ir-^^ 













SL Paul's 245 

not tell how Roman dominion gradually 
faded, how Saxon gave place to Norman, 
and Tudor followed Plantagenet, and Stuart 
came to reign and to fade, and a new dynasty 
galloped in on the white horse of Hanover. 
One can imagine Westminster Abbey con- 
fusing new pageantry with old, the impres- 
sions of yesterday with the memories of 
centuries past, and hashing up the wedding 
of some mediaeval prince with that of Mr. 
Henry M. Stanley. But St. Paul's, as we 
see it, was re-born into a world quite new to 
it only two centuries ago. It came then into 
new being with a quick re- born conscious- 
ness, taking fresh and eager notice of every- 
thing it saw. Above all, it could see and 
take account of change. " See here — and 
here — that was not so when I looked on this 
earth before ! What has gone with this or 
that place, this or that dynasty, which I 
remember stout and flourishing only a 
hundred years ago or thereabouts 'i " Each 
revival means a new Hegira, a new point of 
comparison, a new standard of excellence, a 



246 C/iixn'iig Cross to SL Paii/'s 

new inspiration of sympathy ; it may be a 
regret for the past, it may be a hope for the 
future. Thus St. Paul's has re-steeped, re- 
newed aoain and a^ain, its sentiments of 
companionship with humanity. St. Paul's is 
always young, that is, comparatively young — 
two centuries back to the last birth — that 
after the Great Fire ; then another stretch to 
the former destruction and regeneration, and 
then back to another and another, until the 
tirst St. Paul's stands up in the raw dawn of 
London's history — always young, and yet en- 
riched with the traditions, and much more 
than the traditions, the actual experiences, of 
centuries on centuries. This Cathedral, this 
Q^eneration of cathedrals, ouoht to be able to 
teach us lessons such as no English church 
endowed with a monotony of antiquity could 
well suggest. 

That was a strange period of English 
history when the former St. Paul's Cathedral 
went into ashes amid the Great Fire of 
London. We can see that time through the 
eyes of two keen and shrewd observers, and 



^V. Paul's 247 

never in the world were Iwo contempo- 
raneous observers less like to each other ! 
How seriously and sternly Iwelyn t(jok 
everythinj^ ! With what prosaic, matter-of- 
fact, ignoble tolerance Mr. Pepys took every- 
thing ! Mr. Pepys would have listened with 
interest and a sort of platonic approval to 
Casanova's account of his amours, could 
he have lived to hear the narrative. He 
would not really have approved of such 
discourse or admired such a career. He 
would probably have told Mrs. Pepys in 
private what he thought of the pilgrim ol 
erotic love, and he would certainly not have 
wished her to make the acquaintance of 
Casanova. But if Casanova happened to 
stand high in Court favour, we may be sure 
Mr. Pepys would have chanced the reputation 
of Mrs. Pepys and encouraged in her a 
friendly reception of the foreign blackguard. 
It would have been hard to get Evelyn to 
understand that there really could be a man 
like Casanova ; but if he did get to under- 
stand him he would have allowed Casanova 



248 Charing- Cross to St. Panfs 

to know what he thought of him, and that 
without stint or measure. Never was in 
Court history a more stately, pure-souled 
gentleman than Evelyn — sweet, high-minded, 
high-cultured ; a little cold, perhaps, a little 
over- fastidious, exacting too remorselessly 
from all humanity that austere morality which 
came naturally to himself — the Don Quixote 
of his day and his society, as Pepys assuredly 
was the Sancho Panza. Pepys was in his 
queer sort of way a moral man too ; he would 
have been a very respectable man if he 
had lived in the days of George the Third 
and Dr. Johnson. Even as it was he cer- 
tainly would have preferred moral men to 
rakes and libertines ; but if the rakes and 
libertines were highly-placed courtiers he was 
not the person to weary and worry them by 
discoursing moral lessons ; he would have 
thought it better form and more prudent to fall 
in with their talk and let it be supposed that 
he admitted a general approval of their ways 
and their principles of life — so far as they did 
not relate too directly to Mrs. Pepys. It was 



^V. Paitr s 249 

the destiny of these two men to record in 
personal memoirs their impressions of Court 
society about the time when St. Paul's was 
burnt down and rebuilt, and surely the world 
does not contain two such sincere and faithful 
pictures of the same scenes and the same 
age drawn with such different pencils and 
from such different points of view. The 
value of these books is beyond computation, 
and the value of one is immensely enhanced 
by the value of the other. I should like to 
set off two passages against each other. 
Take the few lines in which Pepys records 
the fact that he was permitted by a laundress 
or a waiting- maid, I think, to gaze upon 
Lady Castlemaine's laced petticoats and 
smocks, and his remark that it did his heart 
good to see those pretty and dainty garments. 
Take Evelyn's stern comment on the death 
of the King, and his picture of the scene in 
which not long before he had seen him sur- 
rounded by his favourite women and his 
riotous men companions, gaming and fooling, 
daffing the world aside and bidding it pass, 



250 C/ian'iig- Cross to St. Paiifs 

in much more ionoble sense than Shake- 
speare ascribes to Harry the Prince of Wales 
and his gay and gallant comrades. " And 
now," Evelyn sums up, "is all in the dust !" 
Probably there was not a pin to choose 
between Evelyn's opinion of Lady Castlemaine 
and Pepys's — probably Pepys, in conversing 
with his wife of quiet evenings, described 
Lady Castlemaine in words which austere 
Evelyn would hardly have cared to repeat. 
But Pepys could do homage in public not 
only to Lady Castlemaine herself, but even 
to Lady Castlemaine's laced petticoats hang- 
ing on a line to dry. Evelyn scowled at vice 
even in the highest place, and pulled his hat 
upon his brows and went the other way ; 
Evelyn would lose his life rather than bow 
down to Gessler's hat in the market-place. 
Pepys would willingly, if he were called upon, 
have done public homage in the market - 
place to the laced smock of Gessler's mistress 
exhibited on the top of a pole for the purpose 
of testing the loyal submissiveness of the 
community. 



S^. Paii/'s 2 5 1 

Evelyn has something direct and personal 
to do with the immediate subject on which 
we are engaged. When St. Paul's was 
burnt, Evelyn was appointed one of the 
Commissioners for its rebuilding. The same 
event, by the way, threw increased cares upon 
Pepys, for he was what we should now call 
Secretary to the Admiralty ; and the Plague, 
the Fire of London, and the Dutch in the 
Medway and the Thames, occupied much of 
the attention of Pepys's official superiors for 
three successive years, and devolved the 
business of the Admireilty Department almost 
altogether upon him. Pepys and Evelyn 
both lived to see, or at least both might have 
seen, the public opening of the choir of Sir 
Christopher Wren's new cathedral. Neither 
lived to see the completion of the whole 
structure, with its dome proudly surmounting 
London. Plvelyn outlived Pepys by two or 
three years ; the chances are that in literature 
Pepys may outlive Evelyn. 

Was there ever known in the history of 
the world and its churches any cathedral 



252 C /taring- Cross to St. Pa id's 

which suffered from fire Hke St. Paul's ? 
The whole career of the church was an 
ordeal by fire. It was injured by fire a 
hundred years before Westminster Hall was 
built ; it was totally destroyed by fire in the 
eleventh century, and it took nearly two 
centuries to restore it to anything like its 
former magnificence. "Away! we lose our- 
selves in light," might have been its motto, 
for it was all but completely destroyed by fire 
in the fifteenth century, and its spire, which 
then claimed to be the highest in the world, 
was destroyed by fire a century later. Thus, 
we have brought it to the terrible days of 
1666, when it went under with so much of 
London to accompany it — one of the most 
tremendous conllagrations recorded in the 
history of great cities. Then came the 
Commission to rebuild it, of which brave John 
Evelyn was a member, and then Sir Chris- 
topher Wren raised the monument to his 
fame, which those who would question his 
renown have only to look upon and be 
satisfied. The great architect sleeps within 



St. Paiifs 253 

the shelter of the Cathedral which he raised 
up out of dust and ashes, and never was 
simpler, nobler, or juster epitaph inscribed on 
the tomb of man than that which commends 
his remains to the reverence of the world. 
The Great Fire of 1666 was but an accident 
in the architectural career of Sir Christopher 
Wren. He had in any case been appointed, 
long before the fire, one of the Commission 
to consider and report upon the entire rebuild- 
ing of the Cathedral, which had been put 
together in a patchy sort of way, one man's 
notion of architectural beauty and fitness 
overriding rather than supplementing another. 
For a long time it had been resolved to 
obtain symmetry, cohesion, and consistency 
in the building, and it had at length begun to 
make itself manifest that such an object 
could only be obtained by the pulling down 
of the old structure, and the erection of a 
new cathedral which should be designed by 
the intellect and the imagination of one man, 
the creation of one exalted intellect. But 
the scheme got pushed aside by one inter- 



2 54 C/iarino- Cross to St. PaHfs 

ference and another. Politics interfered ; 
hostility and rival schemes interfered ; mere 
delay and vague postponement interfered ; and 
it seemed likely that nothing would be done. 
I he Great Fire came to the rescue and 
ordained that something should be done. 
Even then \\ ivn did not have it all his own 
way — what man of genius ever had whose 
lot ii was to be controlled b\ w liat is called 
the practical mind ? b^or example, Wren's 
idea was to adopt a principle such as that 
which I spoke of lately as having become an 
aspiration in the mind of a friend of mine — 
the principle that St. Paul's should stand in 
clear isolation, and be seen along the river 
from its dome to its base. It was in the 
mind of Wren that this should be accomplished 
by making a long line of stately quays to 
border the Thames — by anticipating, in fact, 
and carrying out farther down the stream the 
idea of the Thames Embankment. But 
Wren was not allowed to put this plan into 
action. Houses, warehouses, and wharves 
were permitted to crowd anyway the\- would 




WEST DOOR OF ST. PAUL S 



^V. Pants 257 

around the base of the Cathedral, and St. 
Paul's stood as we see it standing now — or 
rather it stood then and stands now as 
nobody can see it, except in glimpses and 
portions and instalments. Still, we may, if 
we will, make some poetic association even 
out of its present eclipsed and occulted con- 
dition to add to that consideration which I 
have already offered, that the neglect and 
error of past generations has left St. Paul's to 
have its base in the very heart of the City's 
life. Is it not also like some vast and stately 
tree, some great cedar, some lofty palm, some 
majestic outgrowth of a Sacramento forest, 
which lifts its head and spreads its broad 
branches away in the clear upper air, and has 
the lowly brushwood, and the green mosses, 
and the wild llovvers, and the poor, lowly, 
common weeds around its base ? 

Edmund Burke, if I am not mistaken, 
once had an idea that the dome of St. Paul's 
should be gilded over, and should thus flame 
in burnished splendour across the city like 
some golden-roofed palace in the Arabian 

s 



25 S C/iaj-in^- Cross fo Sf. Paiifs 

iV/o/i/s. The maonihcence of the idea ^\■as 

o o 

worthy of the mind of Burke. But in that 
idea, as in others. Burke reckoned without 
his public and without his conditions. How 
glorious it would look, that golden dome, 
lighted up by the morning sky or burning in 
the sunset — while the gilding was new ! But 
how would it be when the gilding began to 
get old and tarnished, when the thick rain of 
the City had blackened it as with marking- 
ink, when the grime of the City smoke had 
settled on it, and when only dim, defaced 
patches here and there reminded the gazer 
that the dome had ever borne a surface of 
shinino- o-oki ? The oildincr could be re- 
newed. it may be said. Yes, it could be re- 
newed ; of course it could be renewed. But 
would it have been renewed without delay ? 
Is it thus we tind that things are managed 
in the City and in all other communities? 
Would there not be delay and debate and 
objection ? Would there not be apathy and 
counter-project ? Would there not be dis- 
paraging suggestion, and questions of 



5/. Paurs 259 

economy and of a cheaper contract and a 
less costly style of gilding — yellow ochre, 
perhaps, or gamboge, laid dexterously on to 
look as well, or nearly as well — as well in a 
manner — as Mr. Burke's too expensive style 
of ornamentation ? Then the gilt of the 
dome would meanwhile begin to look shabby, 
and thoughtless folk would gibe at it, and the 
dome which Burke revered would become 
the laughing-stock for men — of whom there 
were always a few — who had not exactly 
the intellect or the culture of Burke. And 
Burke, too, who had read his Shakespeare 
and appreciated him, to have made such a pro- 
position ! Had he forgotten that often-quoted 
line from " Troilus and Cressida" in which 
Ulysses tells us that " One touch of nature 
makes the whole world kin " ^ Never have 
I seen that line quoted — and I meet with the 
quotation seven times a-week on an average 
— without seeing from the way in which it is 
introduced that he who quotes it fondly and 
firmly believes the words are used to touch 
the heart by exalting the common qualities 



26o Chariiiii' Cross to St. PaiiTs 



of human nature. Alas ! the kinship of 
which Ulysses speaks is a different sort of 
thing — it is the kinship of ignoble, mean, and 
grovelling instinct. The very illustration 
Ulysses uses explains my allusion to Burke's 
forp;etfulness in not takinof the lesson of those 
lines, when he talked about gilding the dome 
of St. Paul's. What is the touch of nature 
that makes the whole world kin } According 
to Ulysses, wise in his own conceit and truly 
in the conceit of others, it is the " one con- 
sent " with which mankind 

" Give to dust that is a little gilt 
More laud tlian gilt o'er-dusted." 

Would not this touch of nature have 
asserted its sway over the average public of 
London as they passed up and down the 
river, mounted and descended Ludgate Hill, 
tramped through Cheapside eastward and 
westwai"d, and saw Burke's gilding on St. 
Paul's dome o'er-dusted by the unadorning 
and irreverent incense coming up night and 
day from the pavements of the City ? How 



S^. Pauls 261 

much of reverence would remain for Burke's 
splendid idea when the dome was growing 
every day more dusty and grimy ? How 
many men would see the idea beneath the 
dust ? How many men would fail to prefer 
any new garnish and glittering sight, any 
"new-born gawd," any dust that was a little 
gilded, to Burke's thought of the golden 
dome ? How many men would not prefer 
the outward show of a piece of gilt ginger- 
bread ? It was lucky that no one really 
thought of carrying out Burke's plan. Burke 
himself has declared, in a passage full of 
most melancholy and unquestionable truth, 
that no human system can come to good 
which is based on the heroic virtues. It is 
of no avail to think of keeping up some 
system which is only to be kept up on con- 
dition that we are all and always heroic. 
So of the fine project for the gilding of the 
dome of St. Paul's. If gilt would only never 
tarnish, if smoke would for ever refuse to 
begrime a golden dome, if men would always 
repair at once the damages of weather and 



262 C/ni)-ijio- Cross to Sf. Paiifs 

of dirt, if other men would be magnanimous 
enough to see a great idea under an 
occasional clouding of dust — then that gilded 
dome might have been a grand success. But 
smoke is smoke and soot is soot, and men 
will gibe and see the ridiculous side of every- 
thing — or what is to them the ridiculous side 
— and Ulysses' touch of nature makes the 
whole world kin, and it is well that St. Paul's 
dome has been left ungilded. 

The night comes, and St. Paul's is alone. 
All that part of the City which approaches 
it and environs it is now without movement 
and life. No liohts burn alono- Ludoate 
Hill, The statue of Queen Anne peers down 
that way into darkness. No windows gleam 
in Cheapside. Bow Bells chime out after 
midnight to mere solitude. There is some- 
thing particularly melancholy, inane, and 
futile in the thought of a bell pealing out its 
notes without even the chance to awaken 
sleeping ears. No one lives in that part of 
the City. That part of the City has gone 
home to bed. It has gone to bed in Park 



S/. Pcm/'s 263 

Lane and Piccadilly, and Belgravc Square 
and Eaton Square ; in Norwood and Hamp- 
stead and Clapham ; in Wood Green and 
Brondesbury ; in Bethnal Green and Strat- 
ford-atte-Bow ; down along the line of docks ; 
anywhere : that City population takes in all 
the ranks and classes of life. The Asmodeus 
who could study the sleeping accommodation 
of all the City folk who fly the neighbourhood 
of St. Paul's after dark, would have rare 
opportunity for easy satire over the social 
diversities of condition in London. Suppos- 
ing he were a good-natured demon, admitting 
in him a certain sympathy for man's distracted 
condition between tempting possibilities and 
cramping limitations, what would be the 
outcome of his survey — despondency or 
hope ? 

Anyhow, the space around St. Paul's is 
silent, clear, and lonely. The living have 
gone. Then, perhaps, do the dead come back 
and take their old places ? Does a Restora- 
tion crowd stream round the base of the 
Cathedral and admire it as it has risen from 



264 C/iariug Cross to S/. P(r?/fs 

its ruins ? Docs Charles himself come with 
his gipsy complexion and his dark love-locks ? 
Does Nell Gwynn come smirking there ? 
and do Evelyn and Pcpys arrive arm-in-arm ? 
Grim Prince Rupert, turned chemist and 
chemical toy -maker in his older days, the 
time quite gone when he could win his half 
of any battle, is he there ? Has that greatest 
man of his day, surpassing man of any day, 
come from his ship-carpenter work on Tower 
Hill, and from his drinks of brandy with 
pepper in it — has Peter the Czar of Russia, 
Peter the Great, wandered westward to look 
up to the dome of St. Paul's? It would be 
curious to think whether this revisitino- of the 
glimpses of the moon around St, Paul's is 
limited or not to the company of those who 
saw the latest resurrection of the Cathedral, 
or whether the spectres from all time or 
nearly so, going back to the days of Roman 
sentinels, may appear of nights on Ludgate 
Hill, and do honour to the latest edition of 
St. Paul's. On that question I can venture 
no opinion. But I am firm in the conviction 



S/. Paul's 265 

that the Cathedral is never left quite alone. 
The living surround it in the day ; the dead 
are free of it in the night. The Monument 
is the contemporary of its latest birth. West- 
minster Abbey is too young to have been 
the contemporary of its first appearance on its 
eastern hill. 



THE END 



rrinledby R. & R. Clark, Edinlniiili. 



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